Are you smarter than a 5 month old?

Happy Pea loves her soft blocks from Aunt Lee & Uncle Keith!

You can kind of see the rash on her little chin :( This is right before a giant scream that was saying...ENOUGH MOM.

Last week while at the doctor with our sick pea, I asked our pediatrician if we still needed to let her cry 5 minutes while going to sleep...he said we could 'give her a little TLC'. I interpreted this to mean 'do not let her cry'. In retrospect I see that, duh, he did not mean do not let her cry. However I managed to convince myself & my husband that we should not let our baby cry, as it would make her more congested & miserable. It started very innocently...first going into soothe her after just a few minutes of crying instead of the usual 5 minutes. Then standing there with her until she fell asleep, not letting her cry at all. Then it turned into picking her up at the first signs of unease...then holding her when we couldn't get her back in her crib without disturbing her...

The culmination of this well intentioned parenting has resulted in the last two nights being spent in the recliner...with us holding our sleeping Pea...because as soon as we put her down she would cry. As you can imagine, we are EXHAUSTED. Today Luci seems to have turned the corner with her cold, so I called Dr. Brooke to see if it would be all right to let her cry 5 minutes before going to sleep. Dr. Brooke told me that Dr. Bhakta most certainly did not mean 'do not let her cry', and that despite my fears, crying would most certainly not make Luci's cold worse...and that it may, in fact, loosen up some of the 'crud'. Then she quoted some doctor like statistic about how many colds Luci will suffer from a year or before the age of 5 or something like that (and it was a lot), and asked if I planned to continue this line of parenting indefinitely.

So tonight I was pretty relieved to let her cry her usual 8 minutes or so...um, yeah. Not so much. I'm quite certain that while, yes, yesterday was a very rough day for Luci (she was too congested to nurse), that she did not need to be held all night long. I am quite certain that our smart baby girl had figured out that if she cried, we would hold her, and therefore, she should cry the minute we put her down. So tonight, while I was all prepared for 8 minutes or so of crying, our baby girl cried for almost an hour. I went in every 4 or 5 minutes to soothe, and she appeared to be soothed, and then the second I turned away from the crib she let out a serious scream. It was most certainly not an "I'm sick, cuddle me" cry...it was an "I seriously protest this change" cry. I guess the good news is that I'm certain her lungs are just fine...