Home, Home on the Range

Wow, so Isabella has been sleeping through the night since she was around 7 months old, but for the past week or so, she's been waking around 3am or 4 am, screaming on the top of her lungs. If she sleeps again at all, it would be for like an hour. We feel that she needs to learn to get back to sleep herself, so we've been going in and talking softly to her, but making sure that we don't pick her up. I have a VERY difficult time falling back to sleep after I'm woken in the middle of the night, especially if I have to listen to my crying baby for 1.5 hours straight, so I've been getting about 4 hours of sleep each night. It's extremely frustrating, and when it's 4 am and I know I need to be getting up again in an hour or so, sometimes I really want to cry with her. So when seh finally falls back to sleep, even though my eyes are burning and my head is heavy, my mind is racing and I am wide awake. The hardest part for me is knowing that I won't be able to sleep during the day when I'm really fatigued and unable to function or concentrate on any work.

How have some of you mothers and fathers out there dealt with this kind of situation?