Goodbye for a Fortnight

So, it's time for our little girl to get on some kind of schedule. The last 5 months have not been easy ones for our family and yet they've been filled with so much joy. Aila is one of the happiest babies I know and also one of the worst sleepers. Each night gets a little worse, the last two nights she woke up about every 45 minutes and her dad and I are exhausted, so we are hope, hope, hoping! that making her sleep in her crib through out the day, having a schedule, and making her sleep in her crib at night will eventually pay off with more sleep for everyone!

I can't completely blame Aila though, I am sure we taught her some sleep patterns that we are now trying to break. When we found out Stuart had cancer, putting our baby on a good sleep schedule was the furthest thing from our minds. She never liked sleeping in her crib and emotionally I wasn't able to take the crying it took to get her to sleep in it. To be honest Aila sleeping on my chest was probably as comforting to me as it was to her, and so she slept every nap close to me. I don't regret it. Those were some very sweet moments and helped me keep my sanity when everything seemed so crazy to me but now that I can handle a little more and Stuart can help a lot more it's time to get her to sleep in her crib.

Pray for us. We have a strong willed, tenacious, and spirited child. All these can be wonderful qualities but make for a difficult "sleepy time". Right now it is taking about an hour to get her to go to sleep and then she sleeps for 30 minutes and we have to do the whole thing all over again. We know it will be rough for a bit. We are committing ourselves for two weeks to do nothing but sleep train so forgive us if we cannot make an event or two (it kills this extrovert) but we are hoping that after two weeks we will be able to have a little more give in the whole schedule thing. We love you all and hope to return to the land of the living soon.

Here's a few pic's taken by our monitor or my ipad during this journey.