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!

:o

Dd seems to be dropping her nap. Annoyingly this has not stopped her from waking in the night and wiggling around in our bed. It has improved bedtimes though. I am wondering if she might go back to napping once she is back at nursery. We will see.

We are also finally dropping nappies completly. Dd has been perfectly capable of going without during the day and night for ages (she is without at nursery) but we have let her have them when she asked. She can be a bit Peter Pan about something's and tells us that she wants to stay a baby so it's not been helped by helpful relatives telling her that 'only babies use nappies, big girls use the toilet'.

Hello....another long term lurker here. I've been telling myself it will get better but I'm back at work next week and still the proud owner of a slightly incompetent sleeper so am coming to you guys for some moral support.

DD is 13 months. Still up at least twice every night and often more, not hungry, doesn't appear to want anything, can take over an hour to resettle. Has to be cuddled to sleep which can take several hours on a bad night. Just for fun refuses to entertain going to sleep for DH. Naps are currently all being taken on me as she wakes after five minutes in the cot. Occasionally fools me into thinking she is changing her ways by taking a two hour nap, or feeling asleep without help. They build you up and then knock you down again!

I'm holding onto the fact that we managed to stop feeding to sleep so improvement is possible. OK, strictly speaking it stopped working and it took three weeks of horrible bedtimes to find another way but even so...

Due to the aforementioned going back to work I'm still in the riding it out camp but am planning to do something soon. When I can face the broken nights!

don't worry too much about going back to work. We all survived, even the ones in proper hard work sort of jobs doing doctoring type things. I work in an office and found returning to work positively restful :o

Thanks Hear. If only I hadn't believed all those people who said it would be better at six months/nine months/12 months. Fortunately I am office based too and co-sleeping has reduced wake ups from every hour so could be worse.

DD is doing her last settling session at the CM this morning so may actually bake myself that cake! Very strange having a few hours totally to myself!

Spend it sleeping, Raspberry! Sleeeeeep!

I think I'd probably nod off if sat at a desk rather than doing 'doctoring type things' (A couple of us are therapists, Raspberry)

I tried to take your advice Elphaba but was thwarted by our noisy postman...

That's the best thing about it elph. I can catch up on my sleep if I hide behind my computer. As long as i occasionally wake up enough to make an exasperated noise about spreadsheets or something nobody notices

Coming out about my own poor sleeper DS3. Neither of my other DC were great sleepers (they are now) but my 21 week old now wakes every half hour during the evening and after 10pm we all go to bed and co-sleep. He still wakes every two hours. I'm very seriously thinking of using a sleep consultant, has anyone done this? DH works nights sometimes (tonight is one) and my son is already asleep on my shoulder so I can have my dinner. It's like having a newborn again!

Just catching up on posts so I can meet everyone... Can see some have used a sleep consultant who is Ann and why is she so special / booked up? Promise not to q jump....

Ann is a magical being who lives in a laboratory where she clones sleepy versions of your children. She replaced my DS1 and DS2 (22 weeks) is getting upgraded at the end of February if he hasn't sorted himself out.

^ thanks.
I think we are going to book one. You can't put a price on sanity sleep...just wish I knew for sure it would work... But it's reassuring to read that most don't believe it will work for their DC and it does. Is it hard work? I'm quite lazy....

calm DS woke up every 20ms to 25ms. Every night of his life.

Actually, I think he once slept 2 hours in a row.

Then we met Ann and 2 weeks later he slept through the night (the day before his first birthday). I truly adore that woman and everyone else in this thread who convinced me to use her services.

Wow!
So good to hear these stories. My DH is a rock luckily and shares the settling but I'd started to feel quite anxious and alone.

I was convinced that she wouldn't be able to do anything as I had tried everything, religiously, more than once. This was back in the day where her web form would actually be open for several days, instead of two minutes before she got booked up, and I think I went on about three days in succession, hovered, and went 'Nope. No point.' Finally did it, and wish I'd done it earlier. DS1 was 21 months at the time (he's now 2.7y). DS2 will be 6.5mo when he gets the Ann treatment if he hasn't mended his two-hourly ways by then.

Oh, and hard work? Well, you do have to be consistent which is hard when you're knackered. Dreaming also has three DCs so probably found it harder than I did with one.

Yes. I found it hard work. She adjusted my daytime times too so I had to adjust what I did with all 3 and that was very hard as it took 3 months to get past the he'll of pushing the nap later. I moaned on here a lot about that. I can't tell you how much I was dreading tackling the nights while having a 3 year old and 2 two year olds . That bit wasn't as bad as I was expecting at all. Yes. You need to be consistent. But Ann did work it very much around what I could manage. Best money I've spent

Well cow's milk got the same response as formula. I will keep persisting, it took a little while before he'd drink water when I started offering it to him.

I'm not sure how practical pumping would be. I pumped some milk a couple of months ago when he had a bad cold and found it took much longer than it did months before. Unfortunately I don't have a shit hot pump just an Avent electric one.

It's awful that most things you read in preparation for birth imply that sleep improvement is linear and it starts off hard and gets easier as they sleep longer and longer. Someone should write a book telling it like it is for a lot of people!

Absolutely agree with you Attitude that someone should write a book (or run a clinic) telling it how it is - I keep on hearing my HV telling mums of newborns who are up all night that it 'gets better' and I think um, no it doesn't (or may not) - I got the most sleep when my DS was 3-4 weeks old and it's been downhill ever since. I also think someone should write a book saying that 30 min naps are normal for many, many babies and it is nothing you are doing wrong - I have spent most of maternity leave being abjectly depressed about this. I have a friend whose first DC also only did 30 min naps till she was 15 mo - the difference seems to be that she didn't spend, like, 90% of every single day worrying about it.

I'm currently trying to wean DS off the nipple/dummy as a way of going back to sleep in the night - I figure that patting him (and putting up with some crying) and saying shh, shh is closer to the supposedly magical self-settling. He goes to sleep fine like this at the beginning of the night and generally on all the 3-4 wakeups before midnight - after that things deteriorate. I'm prepared to feed twice a night, just not 8 or more times! Thing is, what do you do when they can't get back to sleep because of teeth? He spent 90 mins last night from 0430 becoming increasingly upset, kept on almost falling asleep and then crying out again, becoming more and more distressed because he was so tired. And it's like this every night so we can't give him ibuprofen all the time... Eventually at 6 am it got to 2 1/2 hours since the last feed so I fed him (and he then slept for another hour). Or should I 'give in' and give him the dummy when he's clearly struggling so much? Doubting myself here.

PS Elphaba maybe bad form to discuss another thread but I was cheering on your comments on the recent GF thread.

Thanks Fratercula

A colleague told me she had GF-ed her DS at 1 week old - apparently there was 'a lot of crying' but 'it worked' and he slept long stretches at 3 mo. Now at 5 mo he wakes hourly - so much upset and no better sleep than our DSes at the same age! Was thinking of this as I read that thread.

Good. She taught him learned helplessness at one week old. What an achievement. No wonder he wakes hourly now.

Oh I could weep! DS is 2.5 and has never been a great sleeper - it's been an exhausting and fraught few years that brought my marriage to the edge. We tried all of the usual techniques (shush pat, leave for 1 min 2 min 3 min, pretty lights in his room, gradual retreat etc).

We got to the stage where he would go to sleep by himself without drama at night (hurrah!) and then when he woke in the night (happens every damn night), a little gentle reassurance would do the trick and he'd go back to sleep. Over the past few nights, he's been screaming at bedtime (nothing new in his routine or room), in floods of tears about a) going upstairs to bed and b) being left in his room. When he wakes in the night, he cries and screams when I try to reassure him. The only thing that will stop him crying is coming into our bed and as he's a very restless bed companion, it means that DH and I get little to no sleep.

What's going on?!?!? We're utterly exhausted and miserable :-(.

To inject a lighter note to the theme of learned helplessness... DS is currently sitting beside me with a beaker of water. He is perfectly able to pick this up and drink from it himself, but prefers it if I hold it to his mouth I am trying to put it in his hand to gently encourage him, but he'd much rather I did everything bar the actual drinking...

marie I have absolutely no experience as my DS is much younger, but can you co-sleep in his room? (perhaps with a mattress alongside his bed) I'm currently doing this with my DS as (we hope) the start of a very gentle transition to his own cot - at least he'll be sleeping in the right place so might be easier to get back to the situation you want rather than having him in your bed?