Velcro baby & toddler, on my own, please help

[titferbrains]

I am an anxious parent and a bit of a control freak. Please do not tell me things will fall into place later, that won't help me now.

Ds is 3 wo and feeding a lot, including to sleep. Need to help him to fall asleep on his own. Can fall asleep in sling and pram and on someone. No routine yet except I know he needs a morning nap.

I want to be able to shower. I have musical mobile somewhere but haven't had chance to find to see if it will keep him quiet in cot.

Dd is 3yo and I will be on my own with her 2 days a week. She is obsessed with ds and wants to stroke constantly. So am scared to leave ds anywhere she can reach as she can be rough with him.

Would dd be distracted enough by a dvd or cbeebies or something to sit and watch while you shower? And take ds into the bathroom in a nouncy chair maybe so you can at least see him incase dd wants to cuddle him?

Bouncy not nouncy

we got one of those mechanical swing things, which lived in the bathroom
without it i don't think i would have showered in 6 months.

if by some miracle you're anywhere near me you can have mine if you can get it picked up.

dd obsessed with telly was watching several hrs a day till it broke on weds. she has watched ipad today.

i have showered today but, having put ds down asleep, came out to hear him screaming, covers kicked off. seems to hate swaddling - persevere?

mech swing = thought of that, how wide is yrs? im in sth london

our bathroom quite smALL

so did yr kid just cry while u showered then eventually get used to it and stop crying? ds gets really cross when put down if tired/bored.

tbh I just left them in the cot when I used to shower, sometimes they were fine and other times they cried, but only for the 5 mins it took me to shower and dress.

I also put mine in the cot to shower and closed the door so older dd couldn't get to her. I did tend to give her a dummy if she cried and make sure she had had a recent feed but if that didn't work I did shower anyway and just leave her crying for a few minutes because otherwise we wouldn't get out of the house.

You might find a dummy helpful for sleeping, I definitely did because I didn't want the older one spending the whole day in front of the tv while I was trying to settle the baby.

Don't forget it gets easier too, you're doing the hardest bit at the moment but it gets better week by week.

so pls, someone, how do u get baby falling asleep on own? putting down at same time each day? if u used white noise eg radio, did u leave on and leave room?

All those things you've mentioned can help, titfer.
Some babies take a while to get the hang of going to sleep on their own.

Have you got a sling? I know a lot of mums of velcro babies in a similar situation to yours and they tend to keep the baby in the sling pretty much all day and the baby naps on and off as they want. That way they've got their hands free to deal with their toddler. Wrap slings are often best for a newborn - once you've tied it on to yourself, you can just slip the baby in and out as you need to, no need to keep re-tying.

Also can be very effective. It does involve swaddling, but I would say yes, do persevere - I thought my LO hated swaddling too, but actually when I followed Dr Karp's method, she soon calmed down and it worked a treat.

Congratulations and good luck!

sorry titfer, we're in the north.
the fisher price one squeezed into our little bathroom though. i bet you could get one on ebay for a song

Ah well tks Charlotte. Will look at ebay.

Anyone else going thru this and have tips.?

Sling, then a bouncy chair for showers.

I'd have a bath or shower at night I think, no way I could have got DD to fall asleep on her own at that age. Would second the swing though, helped us a lot. Also white noise.

re: using white noise, do you put it on when they are sleepy?

Going to just try and get some sense of DS' sleep and awake time this week and then aim to do naps at regular times each day so that at least when I come to tackle self soothing later on I might have an idea of when to do naps. Am sitting here iwth him in sling, he is having a lovely sleep but I'd really like him to be in a cot/pram asleep at this time of night instead of on me...

just been reading another sleep thread and realising that it will be a while before any pattern becomes clear but I am sure that some gentle encouragement is No Bad Thing.

Off to look for s/h swing.

Tks for suggestion happy but evening showers gives me an insane bedhead, I am not being vain, but there is a limit to how bad I'm willing to look during the day. I don't function very well without a morning shower to get me going either.

titfer, I'm the same with the hair! I have short thick hair and look like the hair bear bunch if I don't wash it iin the morning. Straighteners are a life saver!

With DD we would put white noise on when she was going to sleep and it works like a charm. She still goes to sleep listening to wave music on her sleep sheep now at 16 months.

happy, ytks for post, do you switch off white noise after certain time ??

God it varied! At the minute I reset it so she sleeps constantly at lunch (worried she'll wake up!!), at night we just use it for getting her to sleep. If you have a smart phone you can get apps on that.

Oh this reminds we of when we had to rock her in her pram, with a white noise cd on and a muslin over the pram to get her to sleep. FOR HOURS. She was such a bloody sleep fighter! Fine now though, she waved at me and cuddled her bunny comforter as I left the room today.

Hope it gets easier.

One thing that really helped with us (sorry if you've tried this) was doing things in the same way every time, so DD started to associate it with nap time. I didn't necessarily put her down at the same time every day, just when she was tired. So it would be - into sleeping bag, feed, dummy in, white noise on, cuddle, down for nap etc. Took a while to work, but after a few weeks she completely associated that with sleep time.