Sleep? What's Sleep?

Ya know, Ellie gave me such high hopes when she was born. From the time she was born she had her nights and days straight. She slept all night, only waking up long enough to eat, then crashing again. During the day she'd fall asleep anywhere, heck, even strapped to that bililight table. It's like I'd died and gone to baby-sleeping heaven. By like two weeks old she was sleeping a six hour stretch at night. Annie wasn't doing that at 8 months old. I thought for sure that God was rewarding me for all my patience and hard work and lack of sleep with Annie with a nice, calm, sleepy baby. (You saw how much Annie loves sleep in that last video.)
Yeah, that didn't turn out to be the case at all. Turns out she just got my hopes up, and pretty soon became her older sister's sleeping clone. Ellie, much like Annie, can scream for a straight 30 minutes, at nap time, in a moving car, and still not fall asleep. She can't fall asleep unless tightly swaddled, and rarely falls asleep (even swaddled and rocked) if we're away from home. And she's slept almost every nap, every night, in a moving swing (and even that only gets us 3-4 hour stretches now at night days). Plus, lately she's been randomly waking up (once a week or so) around 4 or 5AM and just stays up for an hour or so. I keep the lights off, don't talk or interact with her, and yet, she sits there chattering and giggling, so very happily awake. Last night I think she spent more time in bed with me than in her swing . . . and in the middle of the night, she did what we thought was impossible. She flipped herself over, fully swaddled, onto her stomach in her swing. Yes, I know, I'm a bad Mom . . . she's slept in her swing since birth without ever being strapped in. She can barely move in her swaddle, and although we know she is way too big and too mobile to be in there non-strapped during the day when she's not swaddled, we thought we had a little while longer before this became an issue. I mean, she can't even roll over from her back to her stomach on the floor, how she did it fully swaddled in a little form fitting bassinet type device is beyond me. But however she did it, the days (and nights) of her sleeping in her swing are over. This just about makes me want to cry. I expect the next several nights are gonna be kinda hellish as we transition our baby, who was already waking up 4 times a night with this stupid cold, full time into a crib she's only slept in a dozen times or so. I know, I know, I've been told it's my own fault for letting her sleep in the swing this long anyway, but when you had a kid like Annie, who slept so awfully, no matter what you did, you fear being that tired again above all else. I was more afraid of becoming that sleep deprived zombie again more than I was afraid of adding a second child to the mix, giving birth, or any other thing relating to a new baby.
I guess it's time to pay the piper though . . . 'cause we're to that point. Letting my baby cry it out. (Technically, we've let her 'cry it out' for months for almost each and every nap, since my children don't seem to be capable of falling asleep during the day without screaming bloody murder, but at night we haven't had to face it yet. Getting her to sleep at first is usually with great difficulty and lots of screaming at the beginning of the night, but during the night we've always been able to just feed her, put her back into the swing, and she just falls back asleep. No swing = night time crying it out. Annie is well known for weeks of screaming for long, long, long periods of time during the night . . . and to this day still 'cries it out' to go to bed for the night, so I don't really have much faith in the 'cry it out' method, it's just the only option, 'cause they do eventually have to sleep, and this seems to be the only way. We've tried everything else, Annie has a great bedtime routine and all that, it just always ends in screaming for a long time, and always has.) With Ellie I was hoping not to have to face this, that she'd just eventually start sleeping through the night, rather than her sleep intervals getting shorter and shorter than they once were (like when she was two freakin' weeks old). I'm so not ready for this.

How can you let this happy, smiling face cry?

This is why she has her Dad & I wrapped around her little finger.