Sleeeeeeep

Okay so this is quite a difficult job, motherhood. I have had no time for updating blogs. We had a couple of weeks around the 2 month mark where things were quite manageable and I even managed to read a book (bizarrely I chose Kate McCann's book about Madeleine). But before and since it's just too time consuming. The poor wee soul has a completely rubbish digestive system. There is, once again, a great deal of vomit in my life.

Little squirrel baby is exclusively breast fed and until last week, I was feeding him umpteen times a night. In fact he was sleeping in bed with me for most of the night and I became an all night snack bar. This was lovely when he was a newborn as he needed to feed often. But more recently it's got a bit silly. We knew we had to do something about his sleeping. Since he was about 4 weeks old, I fed him in bed at 7pm until he was asleep. Then I would carefully put him in his crib. For a long time he would stay there until 11pm and sometimes as late at 2.30am. One night we even went out for dinner and he stayed asleep for the whole time we were away - a bit boring for the grandparents babysitting. That was about 5 weeks ago. Since then, it has proved more and more difficult to get him to fall asleep and into the crib without waking. And even if he finally went to sleep, he'd be awake a very short time later. It was time to make a change. Sleep training beckoned. I spent a small fortune on books, videos and pdfs produced by experts. I got more and more worked up the more that I read. Do I try the cry it out method? Is that cruel? Is he too young for it? Or, in fact, had I left it too long? I learned that baby needed to be put down in the cot awake and NOT asleep. I didn't believe SB would EVER fall asleep by himself. He never had before. He'd always been fed to sleep, or swung in his swing or he's gone to sleep in the car or the pushchair. Eeeek. D took a week off work and we braced ourselves for some very sleepless nights. We agreed that we would let him cry but would go in every 5 minutes. All the books on this method made it sound like your baby would be calmed by your presence and that you would leave the room with the baby quiet and not go in unless he cried again. We knew our SB would not be calmed and would scream through our comforting. And right enough, so it was. We picked him up a lot that first night and he cried for 100 minutes. But night two we didn't pick him up and he cried for 35 minutes. Night 3 it was 4 minutes! And on each occasion he woke just once in the night for a feed and went back into his big cot in his own room. And on each occasion, he slept later each morning. Night 4 was a bit of a blip though. He had some inoculations that day and wasn't in great form. He cried for 80 minutes before falling asleep. But he still had a good night afterwards. Night 5 and 6 (tonight), there was no crying at all. We are sleep training GENIUSES. But my shoulders are up to my ears with tension at the prospect that he could wake at any minute.

Our next challenge is to get the wee man to eat out of a bottle. He just refuses at the moment and it means that I can't leave him with anyone for longer than 3.5 hours. He used to know how to do it but I went for too many weeks without giving him one and now he's forgotten what to do. And he goes absolutely mad if he's given a bottle. I'm not sure how he'll learn when I want to continue breast feeding. Presumably if I was moving to bottle feeding completely, eventually sheer hunger would force him to learn. However, I will offer him one bottle a day and see if he remembers what to do.

D came along to his inoculation this week. That's because I cried the first time he got them and I wanted to see if D would cry too. But he obviously went to great efforts to prepare himself in advance and he remained composed.
Which is quite impressive considering how moist eyed he gets when he's with his 'little dude'. He's so good with him.