Is it morning already?

My god!! I am so sick of getting up to Ruby in the night. I go through periods of being zen about it, and try and accept it, but now I'm old and I'm tired. And I'm over it!

It's not every night anymore, and for that I'm thankful. But it would be at least 4 nights out of 7 that she calls me, sometimes once, sometimes twice. On her bad nights it is 3 times. The reasons are; toilet trips, water, too cold, too hot, scared, sick tummy, scratchy legs or just because. And then on other nights I hear her get up, go to the toilet all by herself, wash her hands and take herself back to bed. WTF? I always praise her to the rooftop when she does that, but sure enough, the next night she's back to calling me again.

Believe me, I've tried it all. And if you look back over this blog you will see how many things I've tried. Rewards charts, sleep studies, co-sleeping, not co-sleeping, ignoring her (bad mistake) and going to her as fast as possible. Each year the bar keeps getting pushed a little further back. When she was tiny I was fine with the thought of broken sleep until she was 2, then improvement, like with the boys. You know you're not going to sleep much with a breastfed baby. What I wasn't prepared for was that her best sleep was when she was a little, demand fed baby. Yes, she would wake every couple of hours, but she'd feed and go straight back off to sleep. After she hit 6 months everything went downhill, and it didn't matter if I gave her a feed or not.

So after 2 years had been reached, still with a wakeful child, I thought, once she hits 3 and goes to preschool, that will sort her out! No. But surely, surely, by the time she is 5 and at school, she will be worn out from the day and she will sleep! Um, no, it won't, it will make it worse. And now she is 6 and a half and I have run out of things to aim for. Unless you count high school.