18 month Sleep Regression and Shipment update

So pretty much as soon as I hit publish on the 'things feel like they are getting easier with Juliet' 18 month post, things promptly fell apart. This started with prolonged middle of the night wakings. Like 2.5 hours of just screaming in the middle of the night. 

Juliet has pretty much slept through the night without a peep (other than jet lag) since she was 3 months old. If she ever did wake up, she'd just roll over and put herself back to sleep with little drama and no need for us to intervene. Both of my kids were super easy to sleep train and I took it for granted. 

So anyways, the night wakings happened and then resolved themselves, but as soon as they went away the nap refusal started. Again, since 4 months or so I've been able to put Juliet down awake for her naps and with zero fuss she puts herself to sleep for a good nap. So imagine my alarm when I went to do my usual laundry at the start of nap time and heard her screaming when I finished. I went right to her because it was so unusual, scooped her up and soothed her, put her back down and she rolled over and went to sleep so hard I had to wake her up after almost 3 hours to go get Forest from school. 

The next day, the same thing happened, so I went to her and soothed her but instead of laying back down after a check in from mom, she proceeded to SCREAM for an hour. I was doing graduated check ins (go in and comfort at elongated intervals), which is how we sleep trained the kids (which honestly, we never had to do more than one check in with either kid because they were super easy on us and I didn't realize what a wuss I am!). She never laid down or stopped crying to entire time and my brief check ins seemed to upset her more. 

This happened for the next 5 days! She'd cry for an hour and then I'd relent and rock or wear her for a cat nap. 

Finally at day 5 I switched to extinction (it's time for nap, I'll see you in an hour...and just don't go back in until the 'nap' is over). The first day of this, she stood up and cried the whole time. 

The next day I gave her Tylenol as a Hail Mary (maybe teething/ear ache?) and told her bunny needed a nap so she had to be quiet and lay down and snuggle bunny so that bunny got her rest and y'all...she laid right down without a peep and slept 2.5 hours. 

Then that night she was up for 2.5 hours screaming in the middle of the night- which I also used extinction and ignored. IT WAS ROUGH. The next day I gave Tylenol again for nap, but no dice. She screamed for an hour and a half. And that was after not sleeping well that night. We were both a mess. 

She slept well that night, took a nap the next day, but then had another prolonged night waking and 2 additional brief wakings. 

our week from H E double hockey sticks. 

I was freaking out! I contacted a sleep consultant for a consultation. She said to  keep doing extinction and to give it a week. Offer brief car naps and early bedtime on the days she refused to nap and then touch base with her in a week to see if anything else needed to change. 

I don't want to talk about fight club and I'm still feeling really uneasy about everything, but the last few days she is back to sleeping 11ish hours at night and taking 2ish hour naps. 

getting better! 

She's even started staying calm and quiet upon waking where she had gotten into a habit of waking up screaming from naps and in the morning until I went to get her. I'm cautiously hopeful that we are coming through the 18 month regression. It was one of my hardest weeks as a parent. I would just go into Forest's fort off of his room and turn on white noise to drown out the crying and read my bible and pray and cry. I had heard of the regression but thought that only happened to babies who weren't on good schedules or who weren't sleep trained yet. Consider me humbled!

In other news, we have some updates on our shipment. While we still haven't heard about the official status of our container, when we entered our container number into the ship's database it said our container was thought to be in the hold and therefore on board and minimally damaged. Hooray! 

The only problem is, they are unloading the ship at a snail's pace. They have to unload every container before they can re-ship them. There are 4,000ish to unload and they are doing this at a pace of about 10 per day. Once it leaves Japan it will be another 6-10 weeks before it arrives in California. It could feasibly be 2022 before this happens. 

Since it's costing Jon's company an arm and a leg to rent us minimal furniture, they decided instead to offer us a payout to go ahead and replace anything we can't live without. They will also help up discard of any duplicate stuff that we are unable to sell/donate once our shipment arrives. This is really the best case scenario of the worst case scenarios! 

We have furniture in storage coming from Houston so will have beds and dressers for us and Forest (but no mattresses). That should arrive next week and then they'll come and pick up the rental stuff.  We bought a used glider, changing table, and crib for Juliet (who is actually still sleeping in the pack n play because we didn't want to change anything during a regression- I'm super nervous to change anything up now because I get super superstitious when it comes to baby sleep!). 

We bought a nice couch, cookware, tableware, towels, bedding, etc. We need a dining table and barstools but we can't find anything we like that is available before June which kind of defeats the purpose. We love our table that's coming but we are worried that after being in Thailand without A/C (was in our nanny's kitchen) and then in a shipping container for possibly a year, it's gonna be in pretty bad shape once it arrives, so we want to go ahead and just replace it just in case. 

our perfectly cozily rumpled restoration hardware cloud couch for the family room

great for snuggling up for movie time. And yes, we were crazy to get white.  Especially in a room off of the kitchen and backyard. It's performance fabric but I still feel totally uptight about it! 

You don't realize how much stuff you need to make a house a home until you have to replace it all in one fell swoop. We are super thankful this happened on this side vs happening while we were living in Thailand. Target, homegoods and pottery barn make this a lot easier! 

Little J just woke from her 2.5 hour siesta. If she continues to nap well I'll do a little post on our house and neighborhood soon!