They sound so cute....

"Baby teeth" -the phrase evokes images of little droolie smiles, with little tiny teeth poking through the mostly toothless gums. The name leads us to believe that these little teeth are nothing but another addition to the already cute and cuddly baby that smiles at all its adoring public.

Someone made a mistake somewhere. The little things sprouting in the mouth of my little girl are not cute and sweet, they are terrible monsters that rear their painful little heads at 1:30 in the morning. They turn a sweetly sleeping (through the night!) baby into a crying, teary, inconsolable mess. Baby! Hah.

Yes, the teething saga continues in the Gerhard household. Generally Sophia has been handling it fairly well. During the day, she is able to do enough chewing, drooling and cooling to keep the pain under control, or at least she can ignore it. She has her moments of fussiness, but that is to be expected. It's just the night times that tend to be more difficult.

As usual, she goes down between 8:00 and 9:00 pm. Recently she has gotten into the habit waking about two hours later for a top up, but generally sleeps from then until 8:00 am. Then the bad thing happened. A couple of nights ago she got up for the top up, fell back to sleep, and woke up twenty minutes later, SCREAMING. It wasn't the "I'm bored" cry, or the "feed now, I'm starving cry". It wasn't even the "Help, I've rolled into the side of the crib and am stuck" cry. No, it was the "Good Lord, I am in pain and someone is going to pay for it" cry. It's much like the "I can't believe you jabbed me three times with that sharp, poky thing" cry.

It took David and I until 1:30 or 2:00 am to get her to sleep, and the only way to do that was by bringing her into our bed. She settled right away, snuggled in between David and I. The only problem is that I tend to be lighter sleeper. Some of my family might call me "sensitive to sound and movement". The problem is that the kid moves around, a lot. Those little legs of hers are always moving, kicking and squirming. So after about an hour of that I put her back in her crib, and crept back into bed, all the time praying that she would stay asleep. After all she did have a dose of Tylenol and Ovol (got to cover all our bases) in her little system. Sigh.

So the last couple of nights have included these crying jags, but David and I have gotten wiser to solving the problem. We tend to be quick learners when it comes to finding ways to get good sleep. At her last feeding of the day, Sophia gets her dose of Tylenol which then kicks in around the time she would wake up crying. We have also purchased Anbesol (a local anesthetics) to use on the bad nights. We know we have to be careful about that, as it can lead to other problems --like numb tongue, which is a little dangerous for babies.

Anyway, as it stands right now Sophia has two little teeth coming up on the bottom jaw. They are cute, don't get me wrong. It's just that we get to see the not so cute side of them.