29 Sept 2008

Sleep strike

We have 2 little girls who have suddenly decided that 3 naps a day are just too much. Right now I'm lucky if I get them to nap once a day for an hour. What happened to my daughters who went to sleep as soon as I laid them in their cots? To make it even worse they are also waking multiple times a night. We try to leave them and let them settles themselves but I usually land up having to go in at least once a night to give someone a dummy.

On the dummy front we have always restricted dummies to sleeping times, or if we are out and the girls are very restless we also try appease them with a dummy. Lately though the girls have taken to filching them out their cots when they are playing in their room. The result is I'm now very careful when I get them up to position their dummies out of reach. The next step is to take the dummies completely away but as we are having high jinks during the night I'm not yet ready to take this step. The dummy removal is further delayed as Enya has taken to sucking her thumb when awake, I can't count the number of times in the last week where I've removed her thumb from her mouth. She has been sucking her thumb off and on for a while but suddenly in the last 2 weeks it is always in her mouth. My worry is when we remove the dummy she will suck her thumb at night as well. At least a dummy I can remove, a thumb though??

A friend sent me the Jericho DVDs for my birthday so I'm going to be very diligent and watch them while doing all the ironing that has piled up in the last week. I think I need a dryer so I don't have to do so much ironing. Either that or find someone to do the ironing for me ;-)

2 comments:

Cathy said...

I hate sleep strikes. Ugh. Andrew just moved to 2 naps on most days - and I'm thankful that he takes them!

What is your opposition to the thumb sucking? I realize it's not the *best* habit, but it's a valid self-soothing, and most kids do outgrow it. Do they have security blankets or toys or anything? Would that help replace the dummies?

Nix said...

I'm trying not to go the thumb sucking route as I have a family member that sucked her thumb, she didn't stop in childhood and landed up having very expensive othodontic treatment to correct her teeth. Given that our daughters medical bills are already approaching a million euros I would like to avoid more ;-)