I dread the night like the thought of getting h1n1.

Been MIA for a while. The past few weeks have been so challenging with baby waking up a lot at night. It started a couple weeks ago. Baby got up one night and refused to go back down. We didn't know what to do. Husband ended up having to get up and let baby play in the living room from 1:30-3:30am. The next night, I figured I'd put a stop to it before it became a habit. Baby went down per normal at 8pm and then woke up around 10:30. I decided to try the controlled crying method of sleep training. She'd cry and we'd go in and rub her belly for a few minutes and leave and let her cry for intervals of 5, 10, 15 minutes. From what I've read, most babies only cry for an hour or so before they go back to sleep using this method. Baby cried for 2.5 hours before she fell back asleep. Then she woke up again 3 hours later.

The next night, since the 2.5 hours of crying seemed like a success, we decided to continue this technique. Baby would not go down at all at 8pm. She fell asleep on my lap, but once I got her into the crib, she wailed instantly. Because I felt bad about her crying, I altered our strategy to the pick up and soothe, then lay back down technique. Needless to say, by 4 am, yes - that's 8 hours of crying, this wasn't going to work. Baby sure is stubborn. I was determined to battle it out with her, but in the end she won. What baby cries for 8 hours? Basically, we've been reduced to letting her sleep in our bed. It's not my first choice, but I don't mind it too much. Our dog sleeps in our bed, so why not our baby?

Husband randomly stuck his finger in baby's mouth last week and made a startling discovery. A tooth! Apparently baby is teething, which may or may not explain the terrible night sleeping. Husband would like to attribute our woes to the tooth and says, well, once we get past this tooth, it will get better. I was like, yeah, this is the first of how many teeth? We're never going to get sleep again!

All this struggling over sleep and our lack of it has really messed with my mental state. I'm super irritable and feel mad all the time. I'm also out to pick a fight with husband over anything. The latest thing that annoyed me about him is his cereal consumption. Last night, every time I went in to take care of the night monster, I hear him helping himself to another bowl of cereal. Granted, we skipped dinner last night, but something about the never ending cereal bowl kind of repulses me.

Also, baby's constipation problems are not getting any better. She'll go 6 days without any action and by then, she's very difficult to deal with. She's not exactly fussy, but she turns into a thrashing fish out of water whenever you try to hold her. Ugh.

All these latest adventures in parenting makes me wonder how other people deal with it. How in the world does that Duggar woman tolerate going through newborn/infant neediness over and over and over again? There's no silver lining in her world?

Anyway, motherhood still sucks!