NZ Baby Blog

My babe has been generally not a bad sleeper - not a fantastic sleeper, but not dreadful. That was until he turned 7 months, and into the sleeper from hell.

For starters I got a head cold, so wasn’t sleeping that well myself, and then he got the cold so wasn’t that chipper either. So we had a 2 week feeling rubbish lead in when the sleep deteriorated. Then for about a week, he was waking up every 2 ish hours and I was definitely hearing about it.

For the first time ever I was getting to 6am with a dry nappy, because he’d wake up screaming, and then I’d put him on the potty, he’d do a big pee, and after a cuddle go back to sleep. While having a dry nappy is nice it was seriously doing my head in being woken up every 3 hours again.

I even started reading various sleep related webpages, about how to do controlled crying etc to get them to go to sleep. What was really gutting was that he’d been quite good about putting himself back to sleep in the night and this was such a giant leap backwards.

He still has a bit of a snotty nose, so I decided to tough it out until that was better, and have been planning how to do the essence of controlled crying, preferably without the actual crying. I did notice that most of the crying technique things say you should get them better within 1-2 weeks.

Maybe reading the webpages was enough, because he’s a lot better now - back to sleeping 8 hours, waking for a quick feed, and then back to sleep for another 3-4 hours.

What did I do to achieve this? Pretty much nothing. I thought it was suspicious that various people I talked to said that their baby wasn’t sleeping so well at around the same age. So did think that perhaps it would just pass - sadly like sleeping 10 hrs straight a night just passed as well. I did put him into bed one night awake and do the controlled crying, without the crying - so more controlled grumbling while I did my teeth, and then comforted him & fed him when he cried.

I also started having cheese and crackers again for afternoon tea - I’ve noticed a definite correlation between my protein and fat intake and his sleeping over the months (more on that later).

So my lesson for next time I’m panicking about sleep is to first think about how long the changed behavior has been going for (a week isn’t a permanent change), to give it a bit longer before doing anything radical, and to make sure I’m eating enough at the right time of day so that the milk is good and sleep making!

‘m a bit gutted that B no longer seems keen on going to sleep by himself. He was doing this really well - I started early, so from a few days or maybe weeks I forget, I would give him the opportunity to put himself to sleep without me cuddling or feeding him.

He still will put himself to sleep in the middle of the night - so if I give him a feed and he’s still awake at the end he’ll generally go back to sleep quite happily. However I haven’t managed to get it right during the day for quite a while.

One of the problems of course is that the only routines I manage are ones around food. I get myself all psyched up to feed him a bit early and then make sure he’s a bit awake when I put him to bed and he goes off to sleep anyway.

However I figure that during the day I’ll just not worry about it for now, but that in the evening I’ll make a concerted effort to give him “self sleep opportunities”.

Having a baby takes a lot of time. There is no way around it, feeding a new baby takes anywhere from 40 mins to 1.5 hrs especially once you take into account burping and general faffage time. If you think you’re going to do much else in the first few weeks with a first baby, then you’re pretty delusional (or maybe just a bit more organised than me).

One of the books I read said that on average a baby will cry for between 1 & 4 hrs a day! My baby didn’t cry for more than about 10 mins a day in 30 second bursts, I think because I tried to work out what the crying was for. All the books say that the crying is for something, and what B’s was generally for was a need to use the loo.

Each potty sit is for between 20 seconds & 3 minutes. I use a clock and would take him off after about a max of 5 minutes if he hadn’t asked to come off already.

That “time” comes out of his awake time anyway, so I guess we got to cut down on his grizzle time, and a bit more of our cuddles were in potty mode, but that’s quite nice really.

Anyway what else would you do with the time - the world has enough domestic goddesses surely?