Every day is a struggle. Every evening a nightmare. No time to relax, no time to ourselves. No peace. Argh.
My husband and I have been tearing our hair out. We've certainly shouted a lot more than we should.
Our 9-month old son (gosh, is he 9 months old already? Time flies*) has become an absolute horror about going to bed.
Admittedly over the last couple of months he's been carted halfway round the country (in a four day period he went to Sheffield, Hull, Ramsbottom/ Bury, Bolton, Blackpool and Worcester) and that amount of travel disturbed him so much that he screamed until he made himself sick all over his car seat on the homebound leg. Admittedly for the three nights that we were away he stayed in houses with cats and he - like his parents - is allergic to moggies. That can't have helped much. And he met so many new relatives, and saw his cousins, which always gets him thoroughly over excited.
But while we've generally accepted him not wanting to go to bed until 8.30 or 9pm on a normal night - not least because it gave him a chance to see his dad when he got home from work which we figured was a good thing to help them bond etc. - when we returned from holiday he refused to go to bed until around 10pm and on one notable night quarter to midnight. My husband in particular has been badly affected, and as a consequence of the stress threatened me with divorce and refused even to contemplate the idea of having a second child. Well, as prior to this we've always talked about two, I guess that's a discussion to be had again and more calmly in the future.
I talked to several friends, and my sister-in-law. All suggested instituting a strict bedtime regime. My husband was instantly against this - he's too tired when he gets in from work to have to immediately dedicate time to a convoluted series of pre-bedtime steps, and he prefers our son able to be flexible and not dependent on a specific sequence. But then he also feels able to hand the screaming bundle over to me and let me deal. I decided enough was enough.
We tried controlled crying. All the books say leave the baby for five minutes the first time, then gradually build up and he will learn to settle himself. Well we tried the five minutes. Our son worked himself into such a state that he threw up all over his sheets. Gross. So two angry parents cleaned up a messy baby, grobag, sheet, waterproof undersheet and - as he was quite expansive - mattress where the undersheet didn't quite cover it. Yuck. None of us were in a good state to settle a baby to sleep.
Now, some books say that just mopping it up and carrying on will teach the baby that the behaviour is unacceptable and they won't do it again. I disagree. My son has thrown up through stress and temper in the car, twice over his poor grandmother when she was babysitting and he just wanted mummy, and now in his bed. I have no wish for it to become a habit, and I don't want to be constatntly washing bedding. So controlled crying methods are not for us.
So we have to find something else. One of my friends swears by the Mill Pond, a sleep programme devised personally for your baby. She said that her son reacted just like mine with controlled crying but that the plan for her son which doesn't rely on it is working brilliantly. Excellent. But we don't have a couple of hundred pounds to spare.
So I devised my own plan, and we're on day three. We decided that while it's been nice for father and son to see each other in the evening, a decent sleep for both is of more value. So now at 6.45 I take my son up for a bath. He really loves his ducks and tonight he sat looking at his bath book going "duh, duh" whenever there was a duck in the picture. I'm not sure that counts as a first word, but it's pretty close. After the bath, cuddle dry and baby massage with his moisturiser, we put him in his grobag, and put on the Baby Einstein Lullaby CD. He drinks a tiny bit of milk, plays with his bears on our double bed, we sing a song, say his prayers and then he falls asleep. All this by 7.30.
It's worked every day so far. The first night he slept right through. Last night he woke at 3.45am, but went back to sleep after I patted his tummy for 10 minutes. I'm hoping he'll sleep through tonight.
We just can't believe it.
I'm intending to vary the routine a little. We've got some other children's CDs and some mood music CDs, so we'll introduce different music. It would be nice get him used to being in his cot awake without crying, so I might try to get him to accept being in his room with the bears and the music to go to sleep without me actually needing to be there until he's fully snoring. But that's all to come.
For now it's a relief just to have had time enough to write this!
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* always reminds me of my favourite Groucho Marx quote: "time flies like an arrow. fruit flies like bananas". Isn't English a brilliant language?
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