Hallelujah - she sleeps!!

I am really sailing along today on top of Cloud Nine - huh, funny that it is called Cloud Nine, since that is how many hours Alexandra slept in her crib last night. Yes, you heard me, she slept NINE hours in her crib!!!!

I've had the best sleep I've had since Alexandra was born the past two nights. With that being said, Monday night started out really rough. Alexandra fought going to sleep for a long time - after rocking her for an hour, I was able to get her to fall asleep and placed her down in her crib, only to hear her awaken 5 minutes later, fully raring to go. Ryan rocked her for awhile so I could fit in a shower (isn't it wild that you totally take a shower for granted until you become a new mom and find it near impossible to find time to take one?!?!), but Alexandra was overtired by this point and cried quite a bit. After I had worked on getting her to sleep for 3 some hours, I was in tears (though thankfully, the baby was not by this time) from frustration and sheer exhaustion. I spoke with my Mom on the phone about something else and she insisted on coming up to relieve me so I could get some much-needed sleep. My attempts to argue that it wasn't necessary weren't successful - and boy and I glad that she won that fight! Before my Mom arrived, I managed to get Alexandra down to sleep at around 10:30 pm, and she slept till about 3:00am or so, I think, at which point Mom fed her a bottle so I could get a break.

Last night, I was cautiously optimistic that the night would be better than the previous evening's sleep. We gave Alexandra her bath, put on her jammies, and then I took her upstairs to her room to nurse her, where she promptly fell asleep in my arms. I rocked her for about 20 minutes or so just to make sure she was good and knocked out, and then I placed her in her crib a little bit after 8pm. My sweet girl stayed asleep and I didn't hear a peep out of her until 5:15 this morning - Ryan and I couldn't believe it!! I was so confused by this, I even went into her room at 3:00 in the morning and placed my hand on her chest to assure myself that she was in fact still breathing (I am sure I am not the first or last first-time mom to do this!). The little angel nursed when she woke up and then went back to sleep until 7:30 am (our usual wake up time is around 7am, but I figured I would let her get all the sleep she could).

I'm hoping that when I get to daycare today that she will have taken at least a few naps in her crib, totalling over 2 1/2 hours (which seems to be the cumulative amount of her naptime - not much, but we take what we can get). Keep your fingers crossed for us that she has another good night and this wasn't just a fluke!!