Girl’s Life

So I found the GREATEST thing to do when your baby or toddler is crying and whining and just being generally wah. Last night, Sophia — who is still totally hungover from jetlag. Yes, still! — went to sleep fine and then woke up abruptly a half hour later. This has been happening every night since we got home. Lovely and sweet baby at 7:30 pm. Evil and angry baby at 8:00 pm. Ugh! And the crying-it-out thing just does not work for this. This is a sad and lonely cry. Those are hard to ignore for long. We tried last night as I was washing the dishes and Chris was laptoppin’. But after a few minutes we couldn’t bare it anymore and went in to snuggle and reassure Sophia that we were, in fact, just in the other room and hadn’t left her forever.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, the snuggling. I snuggled my sweet mini for a few minutes, but by that time she had remembered that I was the one who had left her in that dark room alone and was the cause of her crying in the first place. She began the arching-the-back mad cry. Not as heart-wrenching and guilt-inducing as the lonely cry, that’s for sure. So I sat her down at the desktop computer we have in her nursery (which doubles as an office) and opened up a folder of photos on it labled “Sophia”. And to my amazement she was stunned into silence and a huge smile spread over her face as I clicked from one photo to the next. Her very own Sophie Show. What a narcissist! “Where’s Sophia? There she is!” Smiles all around. Geez that was easy.

Now I just have to figure out how to keep her from crying when I close the picture on the screen. Maybe I should make her a Sophia mobile that can hang over her bed and soothe her to sleep. Or just get her a mirror.