What I've Really been Obsessing About

Now that Greg has so graciously linked me from Stand Firm I know that I ought to be writing all about Anglicanism and all the dysfunction inherent therein. However, I'm really totally preoccupied, just at the moment, with getting this baby to sleep through the night.

The Time has Definitely Arrived. She weighs probably 12 or 13 pounds, she's 5 months, she's porking down baby rice cereal twice a day with delight and greed, And, when she forgets, she can sleep for like 7 hours at a time. So there is absolutely no cause for her to wake up at 2 in the morning and then 3 in the morning and then 4 in the morning for a little snack and a giggle.

I realize, in retrospect, and from reading around the web, that I do what appears to be called 'attachment parenting'. I believe this means that you nurse your baby (on demand), sleep with your baby, wear your baby

woops, wrong baby,
and generally become utterly attached to your baby.

I've done this by default all four times, not knowing there was a special term for it, because I really like them when they're babies and I wan to be with them all the time (isn't that the point? or am I missing something, Matt, you can chime in here if you'd like).

But at some point you wake up and find you have a hulking baby attached to you on every possible level and discover that they could have been sleeping through the night for weeks, but just didn't feel like it, and so the awful process begins.

Monday we started putting her in her proper bed for naps and letting her scream it out in the day time. And then two nights ago I slept on the nursery floor for a couple of hours, sticking her plug (by which I mean pacifier) in her mouth every few minutes hoping to convey the message that I really meant it, she had to sleep. Of course, of course, she wildly lost her temper, coming unglued and screaming for the whole night. BUT, last night, she didn't wake up at all. And, when I put her down last night, I heard her cooing exstatically to whatever it was in her room that she liked best.
Maybe this

or this

or these sheep

I put my money down that by the end of the weekend we will have made this important transition and will move on to the next stage for some other child. And, with the added sleep, we might have all kinds of interesting things to say about Anglicanism in America Today.