Misery loves company: riding the mo fo out into Part II

[ElphabaTheGreen]

In our last exciting instalments:

Needles was at breaking point with a screaming 10 mo DD

Hear had experienced the magic of ONE unbroken night!

Dreaming was continuing to confound all with her ability to manage three children on four or five minutes a night, thanks to DT the Terrible.

Stitch was still having her sleep eaten by...erm...Stitch.

Poppy was pondering how the actual fark she was going to manage a newborn on top of BabyAmex's night time shenanigans.

And the desperate Elphaba had turned night duties entirely over to DH with mastitic results.

Join us with your stories of misery and woe in this, the most sleep-deprived corner of MN!

And I bet they'll be running late...

Don't elph, he was fretting for a drink after just an hour today. He drinks loads. He will only nap with milk. He is not like the other two- ie distractible. It'll be beyond hell. :(

He's annoying me immensely with his night antics as last three nights other two slept through... So blooming frustrating. Sigh.

...and he's broken me. Again.

I've slept for a week on his floor, jammed onto an effing air mattress from 8pm every night and all he's done is get worse. First night was amazing - one wake up lasting 45 minutes, him just bobbing up and down to check I was there. Once again, I felt that old familiar swell of hope. Next night was two wake ups lasting 45 minutes with the same bobbing, nothing more than grumbling. Then it just got worse and worse until the last two nights have basically been me or DH trying to pin him in his bed on a two hourly basis until he stopped screaming. Except for last night, which was hourly until I gave up and took him in the front bedroom where he resumed his usual position, lying plastered against me for the remainder of the night, clutching my hair in his fists.

WHAT THE FUCK AM I GOING TO DO FROM AUGUST??!?

Oh elph, what a pickle.

Dd is the same, except her position is plastered against me with hand shoved down my top. I spend my nights being fumbled by a 2 year old and people wonder why we aren't having another

However, is there really any point in worrying about august now? Surely we have all learnt by now that even if you do magically fix one sleep issue a whole new one will appear a month later. Who knows what he will be doing by August! Sorry, didn't mean that to sound so doom laden, it might be that he sorts himself out by then anyway, you never know. :)

It's before August as well, though. When I was pg and getting big with DS, I needed to sleep with pillows everywhere which is just not compatible with Sir's required sleeping arrangements.

I confess I shot off an email to a sleep consultant today to see if there's any point even trying one since I think we've exhausted every sleep training avenue in existence. I shall keep you posted if we decide to proceed.

I'm staying at the in-laws' house tonight and left DS with poor old DH to deal with. I'm beyond exhausted and fighting a cold so just seeing if I can get one reasonable night in before DH scoots off to the US for 10 days.

elph, my dd slept through five nights after the twins were born. After 6 months of sleep hell. Different situation but some random optimism. No time to look at your link or for more, but I'll be back!

Hello ladies :)

Elph I'm so sorry you're having so much troubles with DS.What are the sleeping arrangements re room(his own or yours),bed (cot or bed he's able to leave) and daytime routines(nap,outside play)?Is there any chance to change anything or have you tried it all (including just leaving him to it)?Stair gate in his room so he can't get out?Asking because a few friends kids were apparently better in toddler/single beds.

DS here started to drop his nap and bounces happily 6 am-9 pm without any signs of wear.I take him outside as much as I can and let him just run.He's still in our bedroom in his cot but he'll be booted out to his own room and single bed by the end of April-I'll need his cot a bit later but want him to get used to new arrangements.

How are the others doing?Sorry for not referring to everybody but when I scroll down the thread it drags the top of the website making it unreadable.

Everything's fine here except having cold for the last 3 weeks.Had my 2nd scan and everything's ok,didn't find out what we're having.DH has a hump because I told him that I'm naming DC2 as he named DS so it's my turn now.I'm not going to back off.

Good luck to everybody :)

Hello bald! Glad the scans are all good and you are doing OK :)

elph I am intrigued by your sleep consultant. Have you heard back? If you try it you will have to give us daily updates so we can monitor progress and steal all the good ideas :o

Hear - I haven't heard anything yet. Just about to drop her another line. Of COURSE I will post regular updates if we decide to go ahead! Did you want DS to magically assume others' unbearable sleeping habits, not necessarily his own, so you can all get personalised tips?

Bald - we've tried everything with DS re: naps, no naps, short naps, long naps. His sleep is no better on a Saturday when he goes swimming followed by a lengthy charge around our local park than during the week when he's cooped up in nursery. We even bought him a new toddler bed to replace his cot to start from a clean slate and I slept on the floor next to him for days to try and get him used to it, only for him to get more and more worked up with each passing night. All he wants to do is co-sleep where (I daren't say this really...) he doesn't sleep too badly. I, however, sleep very badly as, selfish thing that I am, I can't sleep well having my hair repeatedly pulled, gut or back repeatedly kicked, dreaming baby talk babbled in my ear, or weighty child lying across my face when that is the only position his lordship is comfortable in.

I'm signed off work at the moment DC2 would appear to be OK but I'm a wreck. I feel like such a wuss. I sailed through pregnancy with DS, but this one's flattened me. Nothing wrong physically according to any tests - I'm just exhausted. In addition to DS's shenanigans, I've got absolutely crippling insomnia. I'm getting two, maybe three hours a night, none of them continuous. I'm not even half way there. How the feck am I going to cope with third trimester??

Elph you'll cope because you have to.Sorry to hear you're exhausted but it's not a surprise when you describe the circumstances.Insomnia is shit,nothing more frustrating than being robbed of so little sleep you have by your own stupid body/mind.

As for your DS i'd go for cold turkey-no co-sleeping or sleeping on a mattress beside him,no hair clutching or baby talking.His little lordship should be booted out to his own bed and stay there.Kicking,bashing,pinching,pulling,walloping and the other shenanigans are absolutely not on.Stairgate in the room,comforting every 10-15 mins and that's it.You have to get tough with him,what are you going to do when DC2 comes along?

DS sometimes comes to our bed albeit no often and if he starts his antics he's put back into his cot.Yes,he starts waaah,waaaah,waaah but after a while he goes to sleep.Do you want to wake up one day by mighty kick to your face and lose your front teeth or have a black eye?What about if he kicks you in your belly and what the aftermath would be?

Hugs to you,I'm sorry if I'm talking shit here as some things are very easy to say but very difficult to do.Take care,hope you'll manage to sort out your wee monster.

And whip this email to sleep consultant ASAP !

I've done cold turkey on the co-sleeping followed by CC three times now, unfortunately Bald. No dice.

Got an initial chat with the sleep consultant at 8:45 tomorrow morning!

elph I think your ds and my dd have near identical sleeping habits, just swap hair pulling for boob grabbing. The thing is if we let her come in our bed she generally sleeps pretty well. I just get infuriated with being shoved and prodded and smothered by a toddler sleeping on my face (what is it with that!). We've been putting off trying anything until after we move house as we figured she would just regress back with such a big change, but we'll be moved in a couple of weeks so any tips from your sleep consultant would be much appreciated.

I can see where you are coming from bald but leaving dd to scream in her room for ages (and it would be ages) is just not something we are prepared to do. Maybe we are soft or not desperate enough, but it just isn't an option we would consider at the moment. I can understand why people would and I'm not at all judgy about others choices as we all have different circumstances.

Good luck for tomorrow Dreaming... sounds just awful. Poor little mite x

I have been away... hoping and praying that my baby continues this pattern of sleeping for TEN HOURS STRAIGHT!!!
Oh yeah.

But before you stick me with pitchforks...
The sodding twins are making our nights hell.
Im in bed now... gonna sleep early in preparation for the 12-6 merry go round that is my own private hell.
They take it in turns to wake and crash.
After an unexpected 2 hour scream fest from the baby our boy came into the bedroom whispering... constantly whispering... at 5am.
I stropped out to make a strong coffee.
So cross I couldn't look at him let alone interact. Poor guy... all I could say was... your clock's blue. You should be in bed.
Guilt trip later when I realised that someone had unplugged the gro clock so it was all out of sync.
Oh please oh please let them all sleep tonight...

Hear i must be talking rubbish or maybe my DS is not hard comparing to the others. I came to a point that i had to abandon him in the cot and he was going hysterical. I comforted him and left. Crying, picked him up and so on so on so on and that how the night went. Thank goodnes he improved beacause i haven't got a clue what to do. That was the last resort for me.

I'm sorry for all the others on this thread as it must be much harder with more children- hats off to you- and in general i've got nothing to whinge about.

Elph good luck with the sleep consultant, hope s/he will manage to break your DS sleeping bad habits.

Hello Brain hope your kids are fast asleep and so are you.

I don't think you're talking rubbish Bald, I am just a lentil weaving, baby carrying, wuss who breaks before I have even started if I try any sort of sleep training involving crying. Doesn't help that DH is even worse then me so we have just come to the conclusion that we won't try it any more unless we get so desperate we can be strong and follow through. Not quite got there yet, pretty close...

Right - just got off the phone from the sleep consultant. Sounds interesting, so we'll go ahead. She takes an emotional/counselling approach before she goes anywhere near the behavioural stuff, so she sounds appropriately weave-your-own-Birkenstocks for our hippie crew. She's also something of a specialist in kids for whom 'nothing has worked' - she says she's had a few failed cases of CC and CIO that have only got worse afterwards that she's managed to turn around.

A new one for my vocabulary - the hair stroking DS does is called 'silking'. Don't know what that would be called when applied to boobs Hear. 'Milking' presumably.

Another interesting thing she said - a large proportion of her clients had birth trauma one way or another (DS was EMCS followed by a night in SCBU) so she's convinced just from her own experience that that contributes to disturbed sleep.

That's all for now. Off to fill in a sleep diary and history and weep over the contents

Gosh, sounds promising Elph. I did mention it in a vague sort of way to dh this morning and he made his sceptical face at me. However if it works out for you and we don't get any better after the move I would be very tempted to had over the cash and give it a go. I am sure I could talk him round.

I really think she would be happier and less tantrumy if she slept better as I do think a lot of it is down to tiredness. Even if she wasn't and better at least I would have got some sleep and be better able to deal with it! Also I really need some hug time with dh at the moment without a toddler in the middle. My mum is going rapidly down hill with her cancer and sometimes, when things are hard, I just want to be the one getting cuddled to sleep for a change. Surely that's not so much to ask...

Oh Hear, I'm so sorry about your mum

Thanks for the flowers elph. It's a combined with general house moving craziness, which isn't helping at all. We were supposed to exchange today and complete tomorrow but one of the vendors is apparently on a boat off the coast of Italy! Apparently it hadn't crossed their minds that they might be needed to make some contribution to the selling of their property

For flips sake we have talked about this date for months to complete, you would have thought they might have checked it was all sorted before pissing off boating!

House selling is a BITCH and some vendors are just unspeakable. When we bought our current place I was four or five months pg with DS. We made it clear to the sellers we wanted everything sorted before I popped so we weren't moving with a newborn. What did they decide to do a week before we were due to complete? Pull out of the sale of the other property they were buying. We could have spit chips. We ended up moving when DS was six weeks old

Hello all!

Well since first posting sleep has got worse here! Both twins struggling to do more than 1.5 hrs then both wanting to feed continuously at 5am. This morning dh took them at 6 and I slept til 9. Bliss! Don't know what to do about constant waking up at night, any tips?

Elphaba things sound really tough, hugs. I looked at that sleep consultant and she looks good. I too cannot let mine cry. Would be great to hear if she helps.

Stitch, survival is indeed the name of the game, I joke I need at shirt saying sleep is for the weak!

Dreaming, fellow twin mum! I really struggle at about 5am onwards when mine both want to be permenantly attach to me. Does twin mum guilt get easier?

Would love to know whether night weaning tended to help sleep or make no difference?

My sil has a one year old. We were originally due at the same time but I lost that baby, a whole other story. Anyway this daughter is like the queen of sleeping. At a year she sleeps twelve hrs a night and when we visited recently she took a three hour nap in the morning! Aaaaah perfect child. Sil says things like 'isn't mat leave great, you have all this time to get stuff done'. While I'm wanting to punch her in the face, but don't have the energy!

To maybe make you feel better, there is some evidence that the brightest people need th least sleep, so perhaps we are raising future genius',!

B x

Also, we are selling our house too. Suddenly just before we exchange the person buying ares decides she needs a full survey! Aaa arg.

Oh bees people like your sil make me still I was talking to someone in the park today who said their dd slept amazingly till about 1 year old and then it all went to crap and they are up multiple times with 5am starts. Or like my brother they may have a second who turns out to be a whole different kettle of babyness. He was just uttering the immortal line 'but dd1 wasn't like this!' to me this morning. I had to break the news that his dd1 was something of an exeption. So, though I try not to be mean, it can all still go wrong and your sil may regret being so smug.

Thankfully we currently rent so not selling. Just buying. Also the property we are buying was being rented out so no chain that side either. In theory it should be the easiest house buying experience ever.

Right - phase one of the programme has started here, namely getting DS to love his bedroom so he feels happy and safe enough in there to stay there by himself in the dark of night. It makes sense really and it is one of those things I've read before and just thought, 'Yeah, he likes his room. He'll go in there, he doesn't avoid it.' Looking at it more closely, however, about the only thing he goes in there for is the odd nappy change and to 'help' put his clothes away. It'd be like expecting me to be happy sleeping in the bathroom or box room where the airing cupboard is. So our task for this week is to play in his room as much as possible, and preferably getting him laughing a lot in there, so roughhouse play and, if he bumps himself on anything in there, go OTT with TLC to reinforce the 'it's safe here' message.

I set up some pillows and blankets on the floor, books, toys and some of the teddies he was given when he was born which have been doing nothing but gathering dust. He was a little weirded out at first since we'd never done anything like that in that location before, but he soon got into it and decided he'd start trying all of his own baby beanies and bibs on and putting them on the teddies as well. Awww. Then one of the teddies fell over face first onto the floor. DS rushed over to it, started stroking his back and whispering, 'Shhhhh, dark, sleeps.' I swear to Christ he did that to spite me. And how does he know the word for 'sleep'? I suppose I should be grateful it wasn't preceded by 'go the fuck to...', given the number if times he's probably heard me muttering that at him.