Does anyone have any going? I’m prepared to pay handsomely.
Those of you who follow me on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook will have seen me moaning about how tired I am. For the past week, I’ve been having coffee every day – my New Year’s resolution to give it up didn’t even make it to the end of February.
I am tired because my son does not like sleeping. I thought he was getting close to sleeping through the night in mid-January, but for the past six weeks he’s been waking up at least every three hours. And this week it’s been more like every 90 minutes. I can easily count on one hand the number of times we’ve had a four-hour stretch of sleep in the past month. I am exhausted.
So tonight my darling son is going to be sleeping in his sister’s room. Ideally, he’d be in his own room, but we only have two bedrooms so they’re going to have to share. The theory is that if he’s not in the same room as me, he won’t feel the need to wake up to be fed. It seemed to work when we were at my parents’ just after New Year so we’ll see.
I do have concerns about them sharing a room (my daughter attacking him being the main one) but other families do it, so we can too. We have a (very old and progressive for its time – Dad stays at home!) storybook called This Little Baby that ends with a picture of a little blonde girl going to bed next to her baby gender-neutral sibling in a cot. It looks peaceful. This is how I envisage bedtime will be tonight. Using visualisation techniques, I am going to make it happen.
Of course, it is probably going to be a disaster. My son will wake up every hour or so demanding food/trying to roll over (when will he just learn to do it??!), he will then wake my daughter up who will embark on full-blown hysterics and refuse to go back to bed and we’ll all end up in my room with nobody getting much sleep.
So with this in mind, I also have some other things to try.
On the advice of my doctor, midwife, mother and several old ladies at church, I’m going to start him on solids a little earlier than six months, but he still has to wait a little longer. He is very, very interested in food so I’m hoping that this will go smoothly and he will go to bed pogged. Unlike with his sister, who would only eat foods mixed with apple compote. (Shepherd’s pie with apple compote anyone? No? Strange…)
I’ve put a book on hold at the library about giving your child the gift of sleep or something, recommended by Laura at JoyFoodSunshine. Now I just need to summon the energy to first of all collect it and secondly read it without falling asleep myself…
We were lucky with my daughter because she just slept (once we’d discovered that she didn’t like sleeping bags but did like pramsuits) but with this one we’re going to have to put a bit more effort in.
Fingers crossed this time next month it will all seem like a bad dream and we’ll be getting eight hours of uninterrupted sleep every night. Probably not, but if you give up on hope what have you got left? Except coffee. Thank goodness.
The Mulberry Bush 