Night three: went pretty similar to nights one and two, except that Mister Murphy went to R in the night rather than me. He cried, but only for 10-15 minutes before settling back to sleep. Very well then. 

Night four: To bed at 8:00, awake briefly around 10:00, needing a cuddle to go back to sleep. Dream feed at 11:00. Ate well. Par for the course so far.

Oh, but then… Ronan woke up around 2:00, crying, and sleepy me was already in the room picking him up by the time I realized it was the weekend and Mister Murphy was supposed to be doing this. Oh well, too late now. He didn’t want the bottle and was crying, a lot. After 20 minutes or so Mister Murphy came in and took him from me, and after another 20 minutes I went back in to relieve him. Initially, when I took him back that time, it seemed he would settle, and a couple of times he nearly fell asleep in my arms only to start crying afresh a few minutes later. I stayed outwardly calm, but felt more and more distressed inside as the clock ticked on. I was determined to knuckle under, though - if I give in and feed him, then all this crying would accomplish exactly nothing, right? It seems wasteful - waste of time, waste of emotional energy, waste of trust. No, if we’re doing this, we’re doing it.

After an hour and a half, though, I couldn’t anymore. It was too, too much. We laid down in my bed and he nursed for a long time, as if he was starving. I started crying a little - first that I’d failed at the plan, made him cry like that only to give in, and then, as I saw how hungry he’d really been, out of guilt and sadness that I had ignored what he was trying to tell me. That I, the mother who has always felt very in tune with her baby’s needs, had put my Big Plans ahead of his cues and his very real needs.

He fell deeply asleep after that, and slept with us most of the rest of the night.

Night four: I think we need a better plan.

‘Sleep Training’, Night Two

In case you missed yesterday, we’ve been working on good sleep in our house after several weeks/months of waking 4-8 times per night. Read about night one here. The operative rule we are using: No nursing between 11pm and 5am.

8:20 - Baby asleep. He took a good while to go down again, likely wound up from playing with Grandma while I was at Yoga.

11:00 - Dream feed. Again, I sit in the chair in his room and pay attention to how much/how long he eats. He doesn’t seem to nurse as well as last night, he starts twisting away from me after just a few minutes. I assume this means he is full, but worry about how it might affect sleep tonight.

2:33 - I wake with a start, trying to grab and save my baby who (in my dream) was about to topple backwards off our bed onto the cold, hard floor. Am overwhelmed with an urge to go check on him. He starts to cry the second my feet hit the floor (how creepy is that?). Again, I come into his room armed with a bottle of warm water. Tonight, he’s less inclined to accept it, really only sucking once or twice and then just chewing on the nipple. He cries a bit, pushes the bottle away, and squirms, but I just cuddle and rock him until he falls asleep. I try to hold him in a way that he’s not too near my breasts so he won’t get confused about what’s going on. I make sure he’s in a good deep sleep before I put him down - I don’t want to have to start all over again. Total time in his room: 20ish minutes.

4:48 - He’s awake. I go in, prepared to nurse him. I’m not going to be a stickler over twelve minutes here. I pick him up and notice his pants are wet, so I put him down to change his diaper, a decision that Ronan is decidedly uncool with. He sobs like I’m breaking his heart the entire time I’m changing the biggest, grossest, smelliest poop he’s ever had. Finally, we go to my bed and nurse. He falls asleep after (Thank goodness, I was worried we’d be up for the day now!), and eventually I bring him back to his bed.

8:00 - Awake for the day. He hasn’t slept this late in weeks! So nice.

Night Two: Still winning. I’m in disbelief - there is no way it’s going to stay this easy, right?

‘Sleep Training’, Night One

We have decided to make a rule in our house. No Boobies between the hours of 11pm and 5am. We were going to wait until the weekend to start so that Mister Murphy could respond to any wakings during those hours, but I was feeling pretty desperate yesterday and wanted to be doing something about our situation. The night went down like so:

7:00 - Start bedtime stuff. I tried some oatmeal mixed with bananas and cinnamon, just to see if the cereal thing really has any credit when it comes to sleep. R loved it, ate tons. Got upset if spoon wasn’t moving fast enough.

7:40 - Babe has eaten, gotten into pajamas, said goodnight to the house (we walk around and turn out all the lights), nursed. Go into his room, turn on sound machine.

8:10 - Finally asleep. It doesn’t usually take this long for him to wind down, but it’s been more and more common lately - I think I will probably add a bath to our routine for some calming-down time.

9:20 - Baby crying. What? Already? Also uncommon, and enough to make me believe that the cereal thing has NO credit. This is not boding well for our night. I have noticed that since Ronan learned to sit up on his own, he is doing it during his light sleep stages and waking himself up - thus, he wakes up truly crying rather than just fussing a little like in the past. He’s often standing by the time I get in there, and I’m pretty quick about it. I know at this point he isn’t hungry, so I  pick him up for a snuggle. He’s pretty restless, but after about 10 minutes he’s asleep again. I put him down, and about two minutes later he is awake again, sitting up and crying. I stand outside the door, feeling defeated. Mister Murphy goes in instead. There is crying - pretty intense crying for the first ten minutes, then less, then silence. More crying, but softer. After about 20 minutes total (21, actually, I was counting), babe is asleep. Not bad, really. It’s now around 10pm.

11:15 - I want to go to sleep. Actually, I wanted to go to sleep an hour ago but no way in hell was I going to walk in to the baby’s room and undo all that good work Mister Murphy just did. I go in, pick up my sleeping boy, and feed him. I do it in the chair instead of our bed, so that I don’t doze off - I want to pay attention to how long he nurses and make sure he’s really full.

1:36 - Ronan is awake. I go to him, ready to do battle, armed with a small bottle of warm water. I pick him up and give him a cuddle, but he’s restless and looking for a boob. I offer him the bottle, which I am shocked to find that he accepts willingly. He drinks for a couple minutes, then starts to look dozy. We stand beside his crib a while longer, but he is still restless. I put him down and pat his back, turn the sound machine back on. After a few minutes of wiggling, he goes to sleep. So do I.

5:44 - Awake. I do a double take at the clock, then go get the baby, bring him to bed, and feed him. He dozes again for a few minutes, and we are up for the day around 6:05.

Did that really all happen? Yep. I’m shocked, and I don’t know what to make of it. Did the water make a difference, or was this destined to be a better night from the start? I have no clue, but you bet your donkey we will be doing it again tonight, and that this weekend we will continue it with the addition of Mister Murphy as night-time parent. Will the coming nights go as well? I hope so, but I won’t go in with any expectations - my child holds a PhD in flogging those. Wish us luck!

Night One: We are winning.

It’s hard to stay frustrated at this. (Taken with instagram)

I feel like I’ve written this post at least five times

Ronan turns seven months old today and I will write an update with some pretty pictures and stuff later on or maybe tomorrow, but for right now I have some stuff going on in my head that I need to work out.

I am ready to get off the crazy no-sleep train. I have gone from tired but coping to just plain old done with it in a matter of a few short days. Ronan woke up and wanted to nurse no fewer than five times last night, plus two instances where I put him down in his crib and he was awake again as soon as I got back into bed, plus once when he woke up and just needed a cuddle to go back to sleep. Which means that I walked through the hallway between our room and his sixteen times when I should have been sleeping. Which makes me want to cry just thinking about it.

We need a plan, and soon. I haven’t researched any sleep training methods yet, but this cannot go on. It is ruining our nights, but it’s also seriously affecting my days.

We used to have a daytime routine which meant that any household stuff was done by the time R had his first nap, and once he woke up we’d leave the house and find something to do, or at least go for a walk. We were both dressed before 9am and out the door, most days, around 10. Lately, the most I can do is flop myself down, in my pajamas, on the couch and close my eyes while Ronan plays, hoping he will go easily down for his nap so that I can sleep, too. Today, his morning nap lasted a whopping half hour.

Before, I had basic meal plans for each week. Not anymore. We are scrounging to put together meals on many days, visiting the grocery store too often, and it feels like we’ve been relying on expensive takeout a lot more lately. For quite a while I was on top of things like laundry, but now our bedroom is constantly a mess with piles of dirty clothes, clean clothes, sometimes mixed together to the point that I just give up trying to figure out what’s what and just wash it all again.

The issues are many. I have always gone to get Ronan as soon as I heard him making noise. Lately, I wait for a cry, but I’ve never let him fuss just to see if he’d go back to sleep. Do I need to? I don’t know. Another issue, one I wrote a bit about the other day, is that he won’t go to sleep for his dad, so it’s always me getting up. We definitely need more of a team approach to night time, but I feel hugely guilty asking Mister Murphy to get up with him when he’s got to work the next morning. I need to do some reading about this kind of thing, because following my motherly instincts up to this point hasn’t been working.

I know what I can handle. I can handle going into his room to fill up his tank before I go to bed. I can handle him waking once more per night. But beyond that, I know that his wakings right now have nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with his forgetting how to fall back to sleep without me. And that, my friends, is fucking exhausting. It’s time to change things. I’ll be borrowing a few sleep training books today and poring over them later, but for now I just needed to be melodramatic on the internet. And as I finish this sentence, Ronan is waking up again after another mere half hour nap.

Someone please shoot me. Or at least bake me cookies.

Food for thought

Y’all were pretty helpful yesterday, so again, I am soliciting advice.

I am having difficulty getting R to accept savoury In other words, he loves fruit, but isn’t into the vegetables. He’ll eat them mixed with fruit, but otherwise clamps his mouth shut after just a few bites. Which is really foiling my plans to just give him a baby-friendly version of whatever we’re eating for dinner (I tried pureeing some quinoa and kale the other night, I might as well have tried to spoon in dog poop based on his reaction). But it’s not just the uber-healthy that he refuses, he also won’t eat burgers (homemade ones, obviously), either in crumbled or pureed form, he wasn’t a fan of spaghetti, carrots, or sweet potato either.

He likes to gnaw on pieces of things, but isn’t very good at getting them into his mouth once they get all slobbery, and I wouldn’t really say he is eating those things, either. Just feeling and tasting - which I know is important too.

The only cure might be patience, but I’m curious as to how others are handling/have handled this. I was always under the impression that babies would eat anything to start out with, and that pickiness came later, but it would appear that I have been foiled. My boy, as it turns out, is a pickypants from the start.

So, there it is. More seasoning? Less seasoning? Mixing veggies with fruit? Any favourite recipes to share? Today I’m going with green beans, a new food. I’ll try a plain version and maybe add some curry into the other half and see how that goes.

Oh, and PS - I’ve been really bad at making sure it’s been 3 days in between introducing foods. I’m all for being cautious, but it really seems like a big lot of hulabaloo. Neither Mister Murphy or I have any food allergies and he was exclusively breastfed for six months, so I’m feeling fairly safe. If we see any type of reaction we will back off and be more cautious, but for now, I’m flogging the rules all over the place. Not without a healthy dose of mom-guilt, though, so any comments to make me feel better about that are welcome, too.

This is my dilemma - discuss.

Some bedtime stuff

Since he was born, I have always been the only one to put Ronan to bed. At the beginning, it made a lot of sense. He needed to be nursed to sleep, he often didn’t go to bed until the same time we did, et cetera. Really, it was easier and when you have a baby, you don’t mess with easy. Easy is gold.

Now, he is a complete Mama’s boy. He won’t go down for his dad. It’s a stressful situation in which Ronan twists and turns in his arms, crying, looking for me. I, of course, am a sucker and go in to save them from each other pretty much immediately, and then we don’t accomplish anything.

I really, really wish that we had introduced Dad into the bedtime equation way sooner than we have. Not that I wouldn’t rock him to sleep every night until he’s eighteen, but eventually I have to go back to work. And I work 12 hour shifts, days and nights, which will mean that, at least some of the time, I won’t be around for bedtime.

Is there a gentle way to do this? I don’t know. Maybe we can start with Mister Murphy changing him into pajamas, then I nurse him, then Mister Murphy puts him down? Even so, I know there will be screaming. R will nurse until he’s drowsy, but not asleep, and we usually rock and sway for at least a few minutes in his room while he gives in to sleep inch by inch. Maybe the best scenario is one where I leave them with a bottle, go out and let them battle to the death for a couple of nights. Even an iron-willed baby can’t hold out forever, right? Or maybe at least I hide in the bedroom with a bottle of wine to temper my guilt and resolve not to come rescue them.

It’s hard, but necessary. It’s something we have put off for a long time, saying we’ll do it this weekend, and then next weekend, and then the one after that. I’m dreading it. Please, come and save me from my angst!

Has anyone out there been through this? What did you do?

Sailorific. (Taken with instagram)

Family photo!…. we tried. (Taken with instagram)

Swiftsure (Taken with instagram)