Bedtime and naptime has turned into a nightmare!

Well, of course I have read and heard that when babies learn a new skill, it can affect their sleeping, but I never would have imagined what we were in for! These past few days, putting Zoey down to sleep has been just awful. Whenever I put her into the crib, she will not lay still to settle down. She crawls around, or holds onto the crib slats and pulls herself up. When she gets sick of this, she will continue to hold onto the crib slats, and then just cry and cry. I will watch the whole process on the video monitor, and she looks so sad, like she is in jail! :( She does know how to get herself back down and lay down but she just doesnt. I try not to go get her right away to see if she will settle down, but so far she hasn't and I have to go get her, and then I will nurse her to calm her down again and then put her to bed all over again. So, at any given naptime/bedtime it is taking 2-3 attempts to put her to sleep and I think I'm getting back in the bad habit of nursing her until she is actually asleep and then putting her into the crib. But that isn't even working that well because she has started to either wake up shortly after going down for the night, or in the middle of the night. So I finally decided that it looks like we are going to have to re-do Ferber/sleep training with her and let her "cry it out" a bit. I hate to do it, but I really think we need to so she will start going to sleep without a fight.

So, Thursday night when I put her to bed, of course she started screaming her head off. She was not happy with me - as you can see:

Don't those pictures just break your heart? :(

Well, after about 45 minutes of crying, all of a sudden it was quiet. Because of where she was in the crib, I couldn't see her on the video monitor. So, I snuck quietly into her room to take a peek and see what she was doing. This is what I found:

She had fallen alseep sitting up! Poor little thing, she was just so exhausted! I couldn't imagine that she would be comfortable sleeping like that for the whole night, but I was afraid that if I moved her, she would wake up. I was debating what to do and decided that I would let her sleep a little bit so that hopefully she would be in a deep sleep before I tried moving her. But...it never got to that point and she woke up crying about a hour after falling asleep. Luckily, when I lay her down that time, she settled down and went to sleep almost right away. She must have just been so exhausted!

I was hoping that after falling alseep sitting up once, that would be the end of it, but no such luck. Here is Friday's morning nap:

Bedtime was a little better that night, but here is today's morning nap:

Do you see a pattern developing here? LOL. All I can do is laugh about it at this point, but it's getting a bit ridiculous! And the worst part is she is only napping for maybe 30-40 minutes, and only once a day, so I know that she isn't getting enough sleep. But, I'm just not sure what to do! I'm really hoping that this phase passes quickly.

Wow, that turned into a really long post! If you made it this far, thanks for reading!! :)