The SCREAMER

I am amazed by the capacity that my child has for full-on, top-of-her-lungs, "someone is killing me", middle of the night screaming. I think that perhaps she will be a B-movie actress famous for her horror screams, or perhaps a singer in some really bad, loud new band that parents just don't understand.

We have been trying to get through the night without the comfort feedings (I feel like I have written about this before, but I am just to darn tired to remember) that occur at 11:00 and 4:30ish. Plus VK has been waking up at random times (for example after just 2 hours of sleep instead of the customary 4 hours) and screaming.

We decided as a parenting team that last night was the night to commence the cold-turkey approach and let her scream it out. This approach has worked in the past and after 15 minutes or so of total gut wrenching crying, she has gone back to sleep. This can be difficult however for the following reasons:

1) It is difficult to take as a parent because listening to your child cry, or worse scream, is against all the instincts that are wired into your parent being. It makes your heart pound, you begin sweating. All you want to do is comfort the child. Exhaustion has the ability to diminish this, but it is always hard.

2) It is summer and with the windows open you are sure that the poor neighbors are suffering as well, except they care less about the well-being of your child and just want some sleep. I always expect that child services will be ringing our door in the morning after a night of screaming.

3) 15 minutes of screaming is difficult on the mind and the heart, but an hour is complete torture. After an hour Andrea and I have these odd conversations that are totally unfair to both of us, (sleep deprived and heartwrenched, and wanting to make the right parenting decisions) about what the right thing to do is, we know that when we go into her room she will open her eyes, look at us and smile. It seems as if she gets rewarded for this behavior which is no good for anyone. It is hard.

Anyway, here we are enjoying our Saturday, bleary-eyed and loving our daughter who seems to have no memory of the events of last night. She is adorable and even though we worry about summoning the energy to make it to the concert we have plans to go to tonight we love our little girl and thank all that is good that she is cute. We must remember to give our neighbors a nice bottle of wine and some earplugs soon.