I haven’t freaked out here lately about the lack of sleep I’m getting because of Liza’s lousy schedule. The good news is that I’m doing pretty well. Mostly because I go to bed every night between 9 and 10:30. Gasp!

Stephen and I have always been hard core night owls. We were bad before we married and living on East Coast time only made us worse. We regularly went to bed between midnight and 1 a.m. when we lived out there. I didn’t have to be to work until 9 a.m., so it was doable. We moved here and I didn’t work and Stephen has the unusual ability to store up sleep on the weekends so we stayed up like rock stars. Then we had Eli and I moved to sleeping when he slept, so we could still stay up late. Again, doable because overall I was getting enough sleep.

With Liza, that’s all changed. Eli gets up between 6:30 and 7. Liza wants to get up and nurse around 6 a.m. My day regularly starts around 5:45 a.m.

Let me say that again: 5:45 a.m.

In my book, that is the butt crack of dawn.

I’ve never liked getting up in the morning and for the first time in my life, I am a regular early riser. So in order not to commit hara–kiri, I now go to bed like a regular person. I’m such a mom sometimes it scares me.

The bad news is that Liza still isn’t sleeping through the night. We had two good nights this week. Two good nights when she slept, but I still woke up because I was used to her waking me up.

Then she got another cold. So we’re back to getting up to give her cold medicine two or three times a night. And then rocking to calm her down until the meds kick in.

Overall, she is better. I have to keep reminding myself of that because it seems like a never-ending ordeal. She now goes down for naps well and to bed well. No crying for any of that, usually. The problem still is when she wakes up in the night and instead of realizing it’s night time and she should go back to sleep she thinks, “Where is everybody? They must be here with me to witness my awakeness! I will scream until the one with crazy bedhead or the the one with no hair appears!”

Sometimes that comes in the form of one “Whaaa!” and she goes right back to sleep. Sometimes she takes five minutes to remember it’s still night time. Sometimes it takes 30 minutes. The times she wakes up are not on any sort of schedule so there’s no way to do the wake to sleep trick.

What I’m coming to understand about Liza is that she’s a noisy, restless sleeper. She moves around a lot in the bed. I’ve just about decided she wakes herself up, at least part of the time, by scooting into the end of the bed with her head. Last night when she started crying, I jumped up and got in there and she was writhing around with her head up against the slats. I picked her up and I’m not sure she was even awake yet. Of course, when I went to put her down because I thought she was still asleep, she was very awake!

My new trick after this cold is going to be to not have the monitor on at night. Why, you ask, do I still have the monitor on? Because I’m paranoid. I didn’t take the monitor out of Eli’s room until he started getting out of his big boy bed on his own–in other words, right before I had to move the monitor to Liza’s room. So turning the monitor off before she’s 12 seems like a huge deal to me. But I think if I start doing that, we might all start getting some better sleep.