The Storm is Raging

Ella is going through this phase that Suzy Giordano (the author of Twelve Hours Sleep By Twelve Weeks Old) calls "The Storm."

Here is what it looks like:

(I know, what kind of terrible mom takes pictures of her baby crying?)

As you can tell, it's a pretty awesome phase!

It hits at around six weeks, is pretty awful at about eight weeks and then slowly dies down. 

We are at the slowly dies down part right now. 

Suzy says to not even attempt to sleep train your baby during this several-week-long phase. 

Just try to survive. 

That's exactly what I'm doing.

I came up with this new family rule: If you are holding Ella when she is screaming, you are allowed to eat as many of these as you want:

Mississippi Mud Brownies from Our Best Bites

I have had approximately half the pan of brownies within the past twelve hours.

Another thing that has helped me survive is this book:

The author, Harvey, talks for a long time about different theories and stuff that you don't really care about when your baby is screaming it's head off, so just skip past those chapters until you get to the part that tells you what to do to help your baby settle down.

I was convinced that it wouldn't work as well as Harvey said it would so I decided to do everything that he tells you to in the book to prove that he was wrong. Unfortunately, Ella fell right asleep when I did all the steps so I guess he was right. Thank you, Harvey, for publishing your wisdom, I'm sorry for doubting you. But I can't get her to stay asleep so I need to read the rest of the book to figure out how to do that.

And the light at the end of the tunnel is this book that I mentioned before:

One day Ella will fall asleep at 8:30pm and wake up at 8:30am. Whoa, that's hard to believe but I am willing to give it a try because her current sleeping schedule just can't go on. 

It goes like this: 

Scream until 2am then finally fall asleep out of exhaustion. 

Wake up at 4am to eat and then 8am.

So technically she only wakes up once in the night to eat, but that can hardly be called a real night of sleep.

The book is a quick and easy read and sounds do-able once The Storm has passed.

I've heard that Babywise is a good sleeping book too, but all the copies at the library were already checked out. 

It also helps that Ella and I are at my parents' place for the holidays so that there are other people to talk to besides screaming Ella.

Luckily The Storm occasionally subsides and we get moments like this: