Doing such a bad job

[lavenderandwisteria]

I’m just sad.

I thought I’d do so much better.

I knew the newborn stage would be brutal but somehow it was more brutal than I thought.

Then there was a stage of bad day sleep but okay ish nights and then that reversed and now it’s just bad sleep day and night.

So I’m just knackered and I have no energy to do anything. Can’t sleep anyway. I feel guilty about how much time ds spends strapped in his pram or stuck on his playmat. I read ideas but I can’t be bothered doing them and cleaning up. So just walks walks walks. I’m fed up of walking.

Ds starts nursery next month. It will kill me but he’s better off there than with me.

Everyone else has contented babies who eat and sleep. Not all the time of course.

I know I’ve gone badly wrong but I can’t even work out how or when or where.

That’s really helpful, thank you. I think that could work although not a quick fix. He does get upset if he isn’t picked up. But then cries again when put down. This is why co sleeping just doesn’t work, either.

Mine was the same. It took a lot of persistence, and in the early days I was convinced it wasn’t going to work.

Something that really helped me was keeping a diary. I just made a note on my phone and every night I recorded what time we tried putting him down, the time he finally went to sleep, and the time / duration of all night wakings (plus notes on how it had been / anything in particular that worked or made it worse). It meant that a week in when I was close to giving up I could look back and see that actually, we were making clear progress even though it was slow. I’ve just had a look back, and the first night it took 1hr 43 minutes to settle him and he woke 6 times. By the end of the first week it took an hour to settle him (but unlike the first night he didn’t cry) and he woke 3 times. By night 20 it was taking 20 minutes to settle him and he slept from 6:30pm to 4am without waking.

It was a really gradual improvement and not perfect - he still has nights where he wakes a couple of times, and try as I may I can’t get him to stay asleep past 4:30am. But there are no words for how much of an improvement this is on what he was like before.

That book sounds bloody awful. Seriously, WTAF?

@itsjuly

That book sounds bloody awful. Seriously, WTAF?

Why do you think that?