Did you have one of these roly-poly chicken toys growing up? Everytime you pushed it down, it would right itself and a chime in its belly would make a pleasant ding-a-ling sound. I haven't seen mine in years. In fact, I'd completely forgotten I had one....until now.

See, my 4 month old has decided she wants to be a roly-poly toy. I can't talk her out of it! She is working on perfecting the self-righting mechanism whereby she will always end up on her tummy, arms smacking the ground and legs kicking in the air. No matter how many times we return her to her back, two seconds later - bloop! - she's on her tummy.

The problem is that she hasn't perfected the roll from tummy to back, so she gets very, very frustrated as soon as she finds herself on her tummy. "So, why put yourself in that position, Kayleigh?!" we ask her, but she just won't listen. Furthermore, she is subconsciously performing her roly-poly routines. At night, when she's just about to fall asleep, she starts rolling, which inevitably puts her in a wide awake state. Then throughout the night, every 90 minutes or so, she comes up to the light sleep phase and finds herself roly-polying again.

Unfortunately, instead of the pleasant chime, she makes cute-for-30-seconds-but-definitely-not-so-pleasant-at-3:00 AM baby grunts, crescendoing in volume until you help her flip over. Of course, as soon as she's on her back, she pushes to roll onto her tummy again.

I don't understand why this is happening. After all, she has been rolling over for over a month and a half now. I'm betting that she's persistently working on nailing down the tummy to back roll, though - something she has only done a couple of times and probably unintentionally. So, maybe the best way to help her out is to always put her down on her tummy during the day to play so she has as many opportunities to practice during the day as she wants, rather than having to practice at night. Once she's figured it out, maybe we'll be able to get more than 4 hours of sleep at night again!!

In the meantime, we are enduring the hardest nights we've had with Kayleigh since her birth.

I know once I start getting 6 hours of sleep this will all be very amusing to me.

Ding-a-ling. Ding-a-ling.