Chloe has always been a good sleeper. Sophie, however, is a different story. She used to do pretty well, but lately it’s been awful.

Some nights, the screams start at 11 pm, when my husband or I come up the creaky stairs. Sometimes, it’s at 2 am. Somtimes, it’s both. We usually let her cry it out at such a god-awful hour, but it still keeps us up. The worst are the cries at 5 am – too late for her to fall back to sleep, but too early for any normal person to be parenting.

My husband is a trooper. He’s usually the one to console her when she startles herself awake. But her shenanigans in bed have thrown us off our sleep patterns, and it’s become a vicious circle of “who’s going to be the zombie today.”

It could be that she’s having toddler night terrors. It could be she’s not eating enough before bed and she’s hungry in the wee hours. It could be she’s getting too big for her crib. It could be (perish the thought) that she’s simply an extremely light sleeper and too bad for us.

We need to lay down the law and just let her cry. The problem with that method, however, is that although she may fall back asleep eventually, we’re wide awake by the time she calms down. And we don’t want Sophie to wake her sister.

You know that something’s off-kilter when you’re excited that your almost 2 1/2 -year old wakes up at 6 am without having interrupted your sleep for the night. But Sophie should be sleeping until at least 7, for crying out loud. She’s no longer a baby.

Maybe she’ll do better if we transform her crib into a toddler bed. If she feels like a big girl, maybe she’ll start sleeping like one. I hope so. Because if not, my husband and I are going to go insane.