THE BABY SLEPT THROUGH THE NIGHT

No time for witty post titles, Internet. When one has news that glorious, one has to shout it from the rooftops.

Hear ye, hear ye!  I am no longer in danger of falling asleep on the toilet!

You may recall that Sadie was sleeping through the night for a couple weeks back in June, but then she hit a growth spurt & wanted to eat ALL THE DAMN TIME, which resulted in more waking and more feeding and more weeping and rending of garments. The growth spurt ended but the waking continued, and for a while there my morning cup of coffee became my favorite member of the family.

Damn, baby, you look good in orange.

The June sleeping-through-the-nightness was all thanks to the Miracle Blanket that Shelli recommended (and for which I still owe her a big, sloppy kiss), but dammit if those babies don’t keep growing and changing, and with the advent of Sadie’s newfound skill of flopping herself onto her belly in her crib came the advent of “Hey, we really need to stop swaddling this kid.” Because there’s nothing like the thrill of walking into your baby’s room at 4am and seeing her squirming face-down on the mattress to really test the limits of your sphincter.

See, Sadie was stirring in her sleep and managing to flip herself over onto her belly thanks to the fact that we’d been leaving her legs out of the swaddle (her wildly waving arms were what necessitated the swaddle in the first place), but then once she got to her belly, she couldn’t flip over to her back again. And because the thought of her writhing around face-down on the mattress makes me anxious and short of breath just WRITING about it, we figured it was time to say goodbye to the Miracle Blanket.

So, on Sunday night, after a long day of traveling to WV for a family reunion…

…and a visit with cousin Abby…

…we decided to give swaddle-less sleeping a go. And all went (surprisingly) well! Until 4am, when we discovered she’d flipped to her belly and was sleeping soundly (face to the side, not smooshed into the mattress), and because we are a product of the DO NOT EVER EVER EVAR EVAR EVAR LET THE BABY SLEEP ON HER STOMACH OMG OR THE HELLHOUNDS OF DOOM WILL COME RIP OUT YOUR EYEBALLS generation, we got nervous and gently flipped her onto her back.

This was not wise.

Oh, Internet, she screamed. THE SCREAMING. Blood-curdling, snot-spraying, tears-puddling-on-her-crib-sheet screaming. Brad would pick her up and soothe her, but as soon as he’d put her down, it was like freaking David Lee Roth had taken over her body.

Please go here to fully enjoy the experience.

After nearly an hour of being informed that we were THE WORST PARENTS EVER, we took her up to bed with us and I nursed her back to sleep. Whew.

So, last night – after a day of calls to pediatrician friends and exhaustive [neurotic] internet research that told us that it was perfectly fine if Sadie sometimes ended up on her belly at her age – we laid her down at 8pm. There was a brief fuss, and then SILENCE. UNTIL 5AM. At which point we put her in our bed so I could feed her, and then? TWO MORE HOURS OF SLEEP.

AAAAAAAAAA!

Yeah, so we all slept in a bit and I was hellaciously late for work, but OMG WHO FUCKING CARES BECAUSE I FEEL FUCKING AMAZING.

You know what else is amazing? YOU GUYS. Thanks for all the spontaneous de-lurking on the comments of the last post, as well as all the kind remarks about this here blog. And Stephanie, I really hope you didn’t get fired.

Just got totally busted using Facebook at work.