To want to scream when people boast about their babies being great sleepers

[SilkObsidian]

I am so jealous when friends say their babies sleep for stretches of 5hours or more.

My 6-month-old wakes every 2hours sometimes more often. He has 3-4 feeds overnight, sometimes I can settle him with a dummy but often he's wide awake and shouting from 3am-5am.

I get it that people are proud of their babies sleep but couldn't they be more sensitive?! They know I don't get more than 2hours unbroken sleep at a time. Why do they have to be so smug?

Baby born at 9 pm, had some nosh and went back to sleep. Woke up at 3, had more nosh for ten mins, went back to sleep until 8am. Continued in that vein until 3 months when started to forgo 3 am feed...
and just slept from 7am-7pm... 2 more babies, rinse and repeat... Not a single soul, toddler or child ever got up before 8 on weekdays and has to be dragged out of bed at weekends...Ill not give you my address...

This was me, for a blissful couple of months.

Not any more. Now I share your pain and want to throttle my former self, as my now 6 month old DD wakes up 2 or 4 times a night....

The first time my DD1 slept through the night she was 3 years old... And it was the night I spent in hospital having just given birth to DD2 and DD1 didn't keep it up of course she still wakes nightly at 4.5yo

I think the reason the parents of non sleepers are more sensitive to smugness (more than eg re good eaters, early walkers, early readers, etc) is that we're suffering the physical stress of sleep deprivation- if your kid doesn't eat well, it doesn't make you feel physically ill and if you were permanently slightly drunk AND hungover AT THE SAME TIME like sleeplessness does...

Also people can be unbearable- I read a poster on a thread here once saying "it's not just luck, all 3 of mine were good sleepers, you can't say I was lucky 3 times, it was all down to my routine blah blah" My blood still starts boiling as I think of it!

This is why I say nothing! If you be truthful and your baby does sleep it's seen as being smug.
Both of mine slept. My friends baby doesn't so I never mention my children's sleep patterns unless they ask.

cigarsofthepharoahs your post really made me laugh-I also have a toddler who likes to sleep on our bed alongside the pillows. We can go to the Hague together!

Op yanbu.

DD1 didn't sleep through until after I had DD2. DD2 didn't sleep through until she was 2.5 years old. So it was at least 4.5 years of sleepless nights here. I was a zombie and I really can't remember much of DD2's infancy.

DD2 was also the most miserable teether I have ever heard of and I swear she cried/screamed/grizzled for 3 weeks straight at one point, passing out for an hour or so at random times of the day so I couldn't nap with her often.

We survived and I now mostly sleep through, though DD1 (now 7yo) did wake me up in the night to say she wanted some water not sure what I said, but I didn't swear she may have been invited to be independent in her night-time fluid intake

My 18 month old sleeps well and did when he was tiny too, had a massive wobble of about 8 months in between though. I'm grateful beyond belief for every night of unbroken sleep and treat each one as if it's the last one I'll ever get. Every time I hear him fidget or make a noise at night I worry that the game is up. It's luck and it could run out at any time!

Hope you get some sleep soon. Ignore the smugness. People can be smug about all sorts of unwarranted stuff when it comes to their kids.

I 'unfollowed' a friend of mine on FB following a lovely annoying post when her baby was 8 weeks old stating what a wonderful baby he is for sleeping 12 hours straight and has been for 2 weeks this was the morning after my 4 yo ds had been up 6 times during the night. This is a regular occurrence in my house, he's never slept through and his naps as a newborn were no longer than 30 minutes.

That post was more than my exhausted arse could take!

I don't really see why it's something to boast about anyway. whoop-de-doo, your baby sleeps more than average babies do, well done, round of applause .

It happened to me when DC2 was a baby. Someone we vaguely knew had a baby two weeks prior and she was bragging that he was already sleeping through the night when they were about two months old. I just rolled my eyes.

What a pp said. Don't talk about it with anyone, except with people you know are suffering the same. Misery loves company! It does pass.

Even more annoying is the friend whose baby sleeps through the night, but she commiserates on how tiring having a baby is. Oh and whinging when he wakes up early at 6am. Gah!

Why is it when you answer honestly about how your baby/toddler sleeps, if the other person has a good sleeper they are absolutely delighted to tell you about it?

I don't tell people how quickly I conceived when they tell me they struggled!

On a good night, DS will only wake 2-3 times. On a night like last night, up every hour from 1am. He's only four months, so I'm trying not to hold it against him but the the lack of sleep has brought me to tears at times.

I love Emilywrites Sandsnake. Thats such a good blogpost, makes me laugh every time!

Having had a lot of babies, and raised a few others, I just laugh at anyone comparing their habits, anyone having an easy time with a tiny one will no doubt live in interesting times come the teen years, it's all swings and roundabouts.

You have my sympathies. At the school gates the other day, one mum said that her nearly three-month-old baby is sleeping through the night. DD is three years old and hardly ever sleeps through the night. I'm always tired!

I swear listening to those bragging lying
mothers. I had the only baby that woke in the night. That eat chocolate. That wasn't potty trained before they were 1 year old.
The only one that had a comforter. The only child ever to throw a tantrum.
Oh and when she started school. It was all that shit then. Oh they wanted to put her straight up into year 1, but they're not allowed to now.. I swear I heard almost every parent say that, so my DD would have been the only child in reception, so imagine the attention, she would got. She'd have been ready for Cambridge by the time she was 6. .

Haha, GripingPain we can definitely be crying buddies although my particular little bugger is now sleeping better so I don't need to cry quite as much. Which is good cause it made the wine taste salty.

53rdAndBird “Have you tried putting him down drowsy, but awake? ” - we must know the same people as we had that so. many. times!

ACatCalledFang
“zog, WIBU to ban the phrase "Have you tried..."? Have I tried white noise, dark, light, Ewan The Sodding Dream Sheep, "leaving him to self settle", "putting him down awake but drowsy" (nod to 53rd) my neighbours loved me for that, formula, a bottle of expressed milk? “

• absolutely, let's ban “have you tried” along with my particular favourite “well, I never had any trouble with sleeping, I simply put all of mine to bed at 7 and ignored them they went to sleep all by themselves. "

Loved the blog, Sandsnake, I am going to send that to so many people!

SliceOfLime- absolutely, I particularly remember one poster who said she had four children and none of them had had any teething pain therefore teething was was a myth, just an invention by PFB parents. Teething babies didnt have funny nappies, dont drool a lot, don't try to chew everything in sight....

Which is exactly what you need to hear when you're being woken up every 45 minutes by a screaming child who COINCIDENTALLY got 8 teeth in 6 weeks.

One of my mum friends was quite smug proud about her newborn DD sleeping through til 8am. When pressed she confessed to keeping her DS awake until gone midnight, then waking up in the night to do several dream feeds and nappy changes. She thought this meant her DS was sleeping through.

After that I realised that one persons definition of sleeping through is totally different to someone else's. My definition is that they go to bed at a normal hour and sleep through til a decent hour with no wake-ups inbetween. I've been waiting over two years for that to happen.

YANBU - but remember that some people actively lie about their child's sleep, and others toss phrases around with maddening imprecision. Before I had kids I thought that 'sleeping through' meant 7-7. Once I had a non-sleeper I learnt that the medical definition was five hours. Neither of these facts mattered one jot to the woman who blithely told me that her DS 'slept through' from four weeks, with just two wakings - SO HE WASN'T BLOODY WELL SLEEPING THROUGH, WAS HE?

My Sil posted a FB update when DN was 8wks 'newborn stage done, sleeping through all night'. I do love my Sil but could have strangled her as I haven't slept for the last year

YANBU.

We used to keep schtum about the fact that ds was sleeping through from too young so that for a while we even had to wake him to feed him for exactly that reason.

I used to feel guilty when people would sympathise with me about how difficult it was to work ft while suffering from sleep-deprivation

At 15, he's still a good sleeper

We used to say that when we had another one unfortunately that never happened we'd have to have signs up around the house saying, "Remember, they're all different"

OP I confess to being one of those smug, know-it-all parents with DS1. He slept like a dream. We had to wake him to feed in the early days, he'd sleep from 8 till 5, feed and go back to sleep till about 9. Then he'd have two 2 hour naps during the day and it didn't matter what time these naps were as he'd still go down at 8. If we were out and about he'd just fall asleep and I would then go for a coffee knowing that he'd just sleep happily. He could self-settle beautifully.

Then we had DS2. Karma is a right sod.

He simply would not sleep. He was up every bloody hour through the night. He also wouldn't feed. The only way either of us could sleep was if I lay with him on my chest. If we were out he would just stare at me unblinkingly in his pram for hours on end. When we finally got him napping, it was for 20 mins at a time. I'd feed him to sleep out of desperation, only for his eyes to fly open again the second I lay him down. Then, when he finally started to sleep for a longish stretch at night, he was up for the day at 5am. And then not nap. I tried the 'waking to sleep ' technique but ended up so exhausted and run down I developed a chronic ear infection.

Anyhoo, skip forward 6 years and DS1 (The Perfect Sleeper) is still good but takes a long time to settle and DS2 (Sleep Hater) falls asleep almost instantly and sleeps generally well.

It will eventually pass and you'll be able to look back and allow yourself a rose-tinted chuckle. Mainly because you are currently so tired you are unable to form reliable memories and will barely be able to recall a single thing

Hang on in there!!

OP take some comfort from this...

My oldest son woke every 20 minutes; screamed for about 20 minutes... fell back asleep. All night. Every night. For two and a half years.

We thought we were going insane with sleep deprivation.

When he was at primary school, one of the teachers was curious about his intelligence and - with my permission - one day after school ran an IQ test on him. His IQ was measured at somewhere over 160. ;o)

Bright children find it hard to sleep!