Misery loves company: to ride it out or Something Must be Done- pick your camp :)

[DreamingOfAFullNightsSleep]

Hello again all- may the sleepers continue sleeping, the new arrivals due or here get the idea very quickly and the rest of us see the light at the end of the tunnel!

Thanks, everyone. We've decided on nursery for both, so the search for the right place has begun.

I'm a bit nervous about DD being in a room with same age peers who are probably all talking fluently by now, but I think it might prove beneficial.

More exciting news, we start with Ann ON MONDAY! And DS is moving to his very own room

Elph, yes we're co-sleeping, so I'm definitely going to try the whole shebang with the lovey bar the dachshund in boobs, maybe

I'm so impressed your DS managed to open the lock and more impressed you didn't fall apart. I'd be the one wailing!

Dreaming you are absolutely allowed to talk about all the lovely sleep, since it gives me hope for the F.A.A. (future after Ann).

And to help the whole thing, BST ends tonight. Oh joy!

I definitely think nursery has a massive influence on DS's speech - not always necessarily for the better He comes home with new phrases every day, which is fun, but also some pretty choice selections of heavily accented local dialect which is a bit painful to hear. I believe I did the same as a child and, as I was firmly pulled up on 'sounding common', and subsequently don't, we're already pouncing on DS's pronunciations. No child of mine will sound like a northern rugby thug.

You're not moving DS into his own room until you start with Ann are you Poppy? Definitely wait for her guidance on that one I'd say.

Oh, and if anyone has any blanket kicking-off issues waking their DCs, we've got one of these for DS1 and it works a treat. Keeps him covered but he's still able to get up by himself and loudly inform us his sun is awake on his GroClock from the comfort of his bedroom door at the ungodly hour he calls morning.

Cough

[Points at Halloween name change]

[Sweeps off]

Sod's law. 4month old DD is sleeping peacefully and i'm wide awake. I'm going to be slightly over dramatic and say I hate my life right now. My parents are coming for the day tomorrow and I have to do the food shopping, entertain and do a roast.

Hello, SellMySoul - have we seen you before?

Yes, four to eight months was life-hating time for me too. Zero sleep and the prospect of starting a brand new FT job on said amount of sleep. I was quite convinced I was going to die. It passed, I survived and I didn't get sacked from the job

What is this food shopping of which you speak? God invented the Internet for such things I believe.

If you have a 4 month old then you are perfectly entitled to send any parent arriving without at least one meal's worth of food straight back out of the house to return only when accompanied by takeaway. That's the law!

The good times lasted a week. DS is on a downward spiral again and the perma-headache is back. I am hoping that by posting this I'll reverse jinx myself into a good night's sleep.

Peregrin There usually is a regression at about a week after improvement. Be consistent with whatever you're doing and he should bounce back.

No Elphabat I'm a newbie. My 4m old DD is a huge fighter, does not like going to sleep. She will go if rocked for a long time or feed to sleep. She is very sicky though so feeding to sleep normally ends up with me having to change all my bedding at silly o'clock.
At the moment she is wide awake kicking the crap out of me and chewing her fist.

My roast was a success and I managed to get a shower. That makes today a good day. Wow dull life!

Elph the regression itself lasted a week already. I think he has switched from "mummy sleeping here too, all is good so let's hit the pillow" to "MILK ON TAP! Wheee!"

SellMySoul (good handle) they say happiness consists in appreciating the small things in life... ducks to avoid object flying her way Have you ticked off the usual suspects if your baby chucks up a lot in addition to sleeping poorly? Reflux, food sensitivities...? Also, at four months she is barely out of the fourth trimester. There is hope yet!

Peregrin it's just a tiny regression, you'll see.

Having said that, I found that I always feel better when I just assume DS won't sleep well he never disappoints either rather than going to bed thinking he might sleep. Odd but true.

Sell your DD is still very small, so there's still hope!

Elph, loving the Halloween name. We are in a semi-rural area of Scotland with a very ahem "distinctive" local accent, so if DC pick it up they'll sound totally different from me (mid-atlantic accent) and DH (well spoken Scots).

Not doing anything until Ann shares her plan tonight, but we did discuss moving DS to his room already.

I just don't understand how that would work, because his nursery is next door to DD who ADORES going to bed these days and screams in glee and chuckles in the dark for 45ms before falling asleep

We had a grade 4 plasterboard built in the dividing wall, but you can still hear everything and DS is the lightest sleeper in the world.

Those of you with multiples, how do you stop them waking their siblings? Or is there some weird evolutionary mechanism that means they sleep through the wailing?

poppy not that I've discovered. They keep each other awake though now dd is pissing about and dt1 is sleeping through it

love the Halloween name elph

Sweary rant alert Sweary rant alert Sweary rant alert

Once again, my offspring are taking 'proven' sleep theories and flipping them the bird. DS2 falls asleep from wide awake in his cot with no external assistance whatsoever, not even a dummy for night sleeps, (yes, that magical holy grail of 'self-settling' that's meant to fix EVERYTHING), yet is increasing his number of night wakings with every week that passes. WTF...WHAT THE FUCK...is with that?! He's 12 weeks now - 13 on Monday. Shouldn't he be at least lulling me into a false sense of security at this stage before dumping on me from on high with the bastard sleep regression??

And naps...oh, NAPS. WHY must they only happen with any reasonable length in the sling!? He's a freaking enormous child and my rhomboids are SCREAMING. Once again he can settle with no assistance (plus dummy) in his cot which means he should, according to every fucking sleep guru going, be giving me three or four two hour blocks of uninterrupted bliss every day. But no. Twenty minutes in the cot, refuses to even feed back to sleep because he feels so jolly-fucking-perky, then furious for another nap half an hour later. Try to get him back to sleep in the cot, won't, then does two hours in the fucking sling.

AAAAARGH!!!!!!!

So...how's everybody else going?

Poor elph! I always found the self settling myth was a complete load of bollocks to. It's just something smug parents of sleeping babies come up with to explain their amazing parenting rather then admitting they are lucky sods

Yeah, s' bollocks. dd never self settled til 9 months, boobed to sleep but slept through. DT1 had a brief but blissful period where I put him in bed for at as he self settled. pre weaning so before his intolerance and reflux symptoms ramped up... I swore with the boys I'd not walk them to sleep. well, guess what..We did MILES with that buggy. 2 new back wheels within the year miles They don't bloody nap do they, real babies of that age? ? get Ann on him ASAP, and I mean from a suitable age with that

*first

Hello again ladies, de lurking once more to say tralala, we start with Ann next week and I can't WAIT! Really hope she can help us. DS' usual bad sleep has gone downhill even further in the last week, and I'm knackered, short tempered and in a very Something Must Be Done mood. Curious to see what she'll suggest, because her website says she doesn't use CC or extinction methods (i.e. gradual withdrawal, right?). I've bought so many baby sleep books that I must have spent enough for an initial consultation with Ann on those already. Not that they've done any good - I'm too knackered to implement anything more than half heartedly. Hope the lovely, miracle-working Ann will live up to expectations!

Elph, it's all bollocks. Just another myth propagated by those people who post on the Sleep topic about their children going through a regression because they're only sleeping 11 hours now.

You will get through it; remember the first 6 months are the hardest part. You've done this before and you totally got this.

We started with Ann last week and I can't put into words how miraculous that woman is. Her methods should be part of HV/Midwife syllabus.

In 3 days, we went from DS waking up every 20/30ms to X3 times a night and it just keeps improving

We're moving him to his own room next week and Ann even said that one day we WILL put him in his cot and.... LEAVE HIM THERE TO FALL ASLEEP BY HIMSELF!

Puss best of luck next week.

Wow, really Poppy? That's fantastic news, sounds like you're doing brilliantly with Ann already. Really hope we can follow in your footsteps!

Poppy amazing! can you remind me please of how old your DS is? I really want to believe that my son is not the only child this side of 2 who reacted to all attempts to settle outside my lap with unabating hysterics (and continues to demand me through the night).

elph have you tried transferring DS into a baby hammock or similar once he falls asleep in the sling? useless suggestion du jour in any case, I remain deeply impressed at your skills in having taught him to fall asleep awake in the cot!!

Poppy, I'm intruiged - how long odd you have to wait for Ann. When I was looking for a consultant she wasn't even taking people onto her waiting list. And what's the gist of her method if she doesn't do GW? Is it like the NCSS approach?

Sorry - how long did you? Bloody iPhone.

Peregrin DS is 1 in two weeks. My original and the reason I joined the thread is now 2.9 and sleeping ok-ish. Not brilliant, not reliably, but she was SUCH a bad sleeper that it feels manageable these days.

fuzzy I think I was very lucky because the day we decided to take the plunge the web form was open, we registered and she came back to us in a matter of hours.

We had an initial chat and she warned us she was booked until mid-end November, but then we got lucky again because another family rescheduled.

Can't really say much about her method (copyright issues etc.) and she does seem to tailor her plans to each child, but it's certainly nothing like NCSS or any of all the millions books I had read.

In fact, at times it's almost counter-intuitive, but it all makes sense and it's working wonders for us (again, it will be different for everyone and DS is still waking 3 times a night, but we had very clear results after 24hours).