Reaction A:
"Yeah!! That's great news" and excitement and chatter ensues. They ask about your due date and how you are feeling and if we know the babies gender and so on....
Reaction B:
(Smirk) "You better get all the sleep you can now."
Reaction A is usually from the folks who don't have children yet. Reaction B come from the people who KNOW that your life will be turned UPSIDE DOWN for weeks and weeks and that you can kiss your nights of sleep away. I had a lot of people tell me this - "Get your sleep while you can" and while I listened...I did not truly BELIEVE. Well. I believe it now.
For the first 3-4 weeks, Emmett would feed every 1.5 hours to 2 hours which means he would sleep only for 2 hours at a time. Now that he's a little older and bigger he's able to stretch it to 2.5 hours to 3 hours. The sad thing is that I CELEBRATE when I get 3 hours. It's amazing how priorities change. I used to get 8 hours a sleep every night with a nap!
And when you are sleep deprived you become desperate. And when you become desperate you are willing to try anything and everything to get that extra hour of sleep. I am all about throwing money at the problem and see if it helps. And just so you know - it's not helping.
I started to track his sleeping to see if he had any sort of pattern. Sleep training usually begins around 8 weeks according to my book about sleep called Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child.
So I tracked his sleep over 14 days. All of the white squares are when he's awake. As you can see, there is really no pattern. His sleep is all over the place really. But there are some general ideas going on. He usually sleeps around 10pm and goes until 1am or so and has a feeding. Then he sleeps again until 4am and wakes up at 6am. When 6am comes around he has what I call the "Happy Farting Hour". The name is a bit misleading cause he isn't happy at all. He's super fussy cause he is so so gassy. Either Ben or I put him on his tummy and he let's it rip like nobody's business. It's quite the feast for the ears. When this is over he goes back to sleep.
He usually takes 2-3 naps during the day lasting anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours. But then 6pm hits and he is FUSSY FUSSY FUSSY. He looks like this.
After what feels like FOREVER - he falls asleep and we start the pattern once again.
3 comments:
so true! I think we could have switched babies, there are so many similarities!! my husband calls Robbie mr. Houdini hands!
ps. are you Karen from huckleberry designs? - Siqi
Ah, the delightful fuss-fest that begins in the evening and lasts 3-4 hours...I remember it well. :-) The good news: at 3 months, the worst of it will mostly be over. (Gigi still let off some steam in the evenings until around 4 months, but it was for a shorter time and MUCH less intense.)
Ugh. I am so sorry, Karen!!
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