Spoke too soon. Just when I was convinced she was better and I was better, she had one of the most difficult nights. For the first time since I started putting Allie to bed in her room and crib weeks ago, she refused to go to sleep after her 9pm feeding. (Yeah, I’d planned on putting her to bed earlier but the stepkidlet invited her new guy over and he’s an amazing pianist so we made him give us a little private concert.) I had to resort to the pacifier thing, only for the first time, that didn’t work. It put her to sleep pretty efficiently, but within minutes (or less), it’d fall out as she fell asleep, and instead of staying asleep, she’d wake up and bawl. I would get up and reinsert the pacifier. This cycle continued from 9:20p until past midnight. I was losing it. Mr. W finally got out of bed and helped me try different things, so we changed her diaper, tried to burp her, I fed her off-schedule around 12:30a, we played music, picked her up, put her down, comforted her, nothing helped. She kept crying. I ended up praying through my tears. Mr. W finally tried turning on the vacuum cleaner to full blast and that put her to sleep in about 10 minutes. When I turned it down to just the air refreshening mode after that, she jumped, but stayed asleep. It was already past 2am. She didn’t wake up until after 7am, but it was a bad morning, too. She would only eat one side, so I pumped the other side as I held her in my other arm; the hand pump leaked milk on me (I was already leaking on my own anyhow), then as I was aghast at why the pump was leaking, I felt more liquid on my left and realized Allie spit up (a lot) on my right. I had to clean us up, clean the pump parts and store the milk, all that as she wailed. She wailed in the morning so loudly and consistently, for hours, that she was screaming long and hard at the top of her lungs. I must’ve cried 3-4 times this morning. My mom immediately took the rest of the day off and came over, and Allie is now sleeping on her as she and I chat and she fills me in on all the grownup stuff that was going on in my childhood that I wasn’t allowed to know back then. At least some bonding came out of this.

I think I may have regressed back into the postpartum depression thing, though. My mood matches the rainy gray weather outside.