Traveling Woes

On most evenings when we are at home, we have a near perfect child.  Admittedly, I'm a little bias, but it's true.  Mainly this perfection is in relation to her sleeping ability.  95% of the time we simply lay her down around 7:30 and she goes right to sleep without a fuss at all.  8-12 hours later, she wakes up without a peep all night.  She naps great as well.  We just lay her down in the afternoon and she goes right to sleep for 2 or more hours.  It's amazing!

Since we have been on our trip to New Mexico this has not been the case.  Our perfect little sleeper chose to not come along for the trip.  For the first leg of the trip, we drove to Springfield MO. to my mom's house.  We arrived at close to 11 in the evening and we promptly put her to bed.  Unfortunately, this did not stick and Julia thought her short nap in the car was quite sufficient for her evening rest.  She promptly woke back up and was WIRED!!  She was running around like crazy until 2AM!  Finally, after much coaxing, we got her to fall asleep

And this similar story has played out for our entire trip so far.  Nearly every nap has resulted in humongous crying fits.  At one point we were in the room with her (out of her eyesight) and she would cry and cry and cry... stop and say "Daddy?" and then return to her fit.  She is totally playing me!  At one point though, we couldn't help but laugh because she stopped crying long enough to say "Ice cream.... Yummy!".  We had had fried ice cream for lunch and she was apparently remembering the deliciousness.  

And that brings us to this morning.  She woke up first at 4:30.  I got her settled back down but it didn't stick.  At 6:30 she was up again.  It was at this point that I considered it a lost cause.  I resigned myself to the fact that sleeping in was not an option today.  Now I am introducing Julia to "Beauty and the Beast".  She is on the floor watching the movie with her "O's" (Cheerios) and I am on my computer wrapped up in a snuggie. (don't judge me.  It's cold in here). Although I am fast forwarding through all of the scary parts.  I never realized how scary the beast could be.  Julia doesn't seem to mind, but the dad in me feels the need to fast forward.  

Now I know that kids typically have trouble with sleeping while traveling, but I'm really hoping that she can pull it together because she is exhausting me!  It's a good thing she is so darn cute and totally worth all of the trouble.