Misery Loves Company...nope. Still not sleeping.

[ElphabaTheGreen]

Long-term sleep deprivation getting you down?

Join us here for and plenty of sympathy.

Ride the mo-fo out or something must be done - the choice is yours.

And remember the First Rule of Sleep Club - do not mention that things are going well or you will PAY.

Have quickly skimmed for updates from you all - MN-ing seems to be incompatible with organising new house (or rather keeping it in any sort of steady state as DS crawls around emptying tissue boxes, using the dishwasher rack as a car on the kitchen floor, etc.)

Am envious of you seeing actual improvements already with Ann Elph. DS seems determined to be ill at least 75% of the time, to ensure we don't make any progress with his sleep. It feels like a permanent game of snakes and ladders.

Chocolate and Scotty absolutely agree on the long night wakings. Don't know about you but there seems no rhyme or reason to it - sometimes DS will wake loads but go back to sleep fairly quickly each time, other nights he'll be up for an hour or more.

DS has chosen this week to start signing for milk, which really tests my resolve on night feeds. He's like a drowning man waving this little arm above his head... sleepy but pleading desperately for milk! So much for all this signing reduces frustration business. Hmm, only if you actually give them what they want!

Oh, we're getting plenty of illness. Frustrating, isn't it? She's already given us a week extension. He's started nursery so I'm expecting more periods of ill-health than good for at least a year, yet

Well, I'm up for Mother of the Year. I finally got DS2 back to sleep at 5:30. DS1 woke me up from a really deep sleep just after 6, demanding/whinging/shouting only for me and not DH. I snapped at him, asking why he had to get me up and not daddy....then noticed he was covered in vomit. As was his pillow. He'd slept in it all night, even until his GroClock had changed He's being a little angel this morning, just to make me feel extra specially shit.

Oh elph that sounds like a tough start to the day. Hope the rest of the day went better.

Just back from a few nights away here where every night DD slept a little worse...the only upside was that it did at least push the wake up call back until the slightly more acceptable 6am.

Hope your DS1 is doing better today Elph, there just seem to be so many things around at the moment. DD has only just got over a fortnight of being sniffly and generally under the weather.

Fratercula we have the same with the milk sign, plus she switches hands if it isn't working, then ramps up to using both! Not sure about the improving communication though, she also uses it during the day to mean hungry or thirsty.

Hello to everyone else, will read the rest of the thread later.

I haven't posted for a while but I've been reading. I hope some of the illnesses are passing. Elphaba - I have done similar. Sent a whiny DD back to bed in the middle of the night, fobbed off stories of hurting tummy, five minutes later....

Can I just say, because you will all feel my pain, if ONE MORE PERSON says "Oooh, I don't know how you do it, I need my sleep" I will not be fucking responsible for my actions. I don't need my sleep. No. Not at all. I run on air me.

Ha ha Penguins to your last paragraph! I know exactly what you mean. Today I got 'you are doing really well on it'..... Doing well on what exactly? Nearly a year of no more than 3 hours sleep at a time? They make it sound like some kind of diet! They are obviously not seeing what I see when I look in the mirror. I'm 29 but reckon I look about 49 right now!

I get that too.

A while back I replied "Oh, I'm not. I used to look like Elle MacPhearson before I had kids"

Except apparently my comic timing was lost along with my patience when I stopped getting any sleep, because she looked at me like . I think she thought I believed it

YY to 'I need my sleep' like we all aspire to be Margaret Thatcher and deliberately prevent our offspring from sleeping to ensure we have as many hours in the day as possible to be productive

I have to say, I look at a lot of photos of friends on FB and there is a marked ageing from pre-DCs to post, and many of them have sleepers. I can't imagine how I must compare with my almost three years of zero sleep.

I just try to avoid posting photos of myself. It would probably invite too many concerned queries into my wellbeing.

YY to the post-kids rapid ageing! And not just the non-sleepers - I've come to the conclusion that kids basically wreck your body and mind. Its lucky they're cute sometimes .

Stupidly read this today thinking hurrah, if too much sleep is bad for you then I must be doing OK on next-to-bloody-none. Sadly not. This "adults who usually sleep for less than six hours or more than eight, are at risk of dying earlier than those sleep for between six and eight hours" particularly cheered me up... More than 8 hours sleep?! In one go?! And its going to kill you?! One day I'm going to sleep for about a week. One day...

How's the sleep training going Elph and Fratercula?

We're still on mixed nights here, some average, some good, some utterly fucking crap. DD1 is still having nightmares and took 3 bloody hours to resettle the other night. DD2 obviously woke 30 minutes later. Lovely.

The really crap thing is on those rare occasions when they do both decide to sleep through, I can't actually sleep. I just lie there waiting for one of them to wake up. For hours! So frustrating!

I knew before I even clicked it which article that was going to be

We're making steady progress. I think we're still a long way off the Holy Grail of STTN - and I sincerely doubt we'll get there before we're finished with Ann - but I am hopeful of something more manageable for when I go back to work, even if it's still co-sleeping with only two or three wake-ups. Ann is great at acknowledging that 12 hours straight is beyond the capabilities of many babies, and that many are not developmentally ready for a lot longer than others so she never pushes beyond what he is naturally demonstrating he is capable of which is incredibly reassuring. If we do something where crying is/will be involved, we can be pretty confident that it will lead to positive change, not because he's being forced into something he is in no way ready for. So I'm happy with progress so far

Another one who hates those type of comments! and has aged significantly since having kids

So glad to hear it's still going well elphaba.

I think its great that Ann has realistic expectations of babies and therefore transmits these to parents. Bloody shame more people don't get this - I find myself constantly telling people the MN poll stats that well over 50% of babies are regularly waking in the night at 1 YO and everyone else is lying.

I have found having low expectations this time around have made things easier than last time when everyone told me that the first 12 weeks were tough but after that they would sleep. HA HA bloody HA. Would be nice if DD1 managed to STTN all the time at 3 years old let alone 3 months.

Hello ladies, I'm really starting to panic that something is wrong with my DS, he is 11.5mo and still has yet to sleep through the night. He settles well on his own at bedtime and we don't have any 'bad habits' or 'rods' but still he wakes around 3 - 6 times a night, mostly settles down easily but sometimes we can be going in and out resettling him for over an hour. I'm starting to worry that he may have something medically wrong with him that I've missed. Drs aren't interested as he is a very healthy boy other than poor sleeping. I'm so anxious about the night waking, it's driving me insane!

I assume you're being ironic needsweets? Either way, I'm chuckling (and patting you on the head if you're being serious).

Oh God yes.

The number of people who've suggested mine were ill. Mind you, it does hold out the tantalising prospect that if you diagnose them correctly they will sleep...

Hang in there.

Mixed bag here. Some nights we've been having only one wake up between 8 and 5 (sometimes with a resettling around 11). Other nights - like last night- awake Every Sodding Hour.

I hate this. This is how DD1 went. DD2 was consistent - she woke every 2 hours until she was ready to sleep through, then over about a fortnight she shifted and never really woke before 5 again (bar illness, etc). DD1 was erratic for months and months and it was what finally broke me to sleep train. It's like the one/two good nights a week are dangled before as some kind of cruel, just out of reach, prize.

I think half the people on the sleep board are 'worried' (re: praying for) a medical problem to explain their child's perfectly normal, if somewhat challenging, sleeping patterns, so that there might be a pill that is not a sedative, but will make them sleep 12 hours a night forevermore without any crying needed.

Then we come along like Dementors, grey and withered, sucking the hope out of everything

I've kinda lost all sense of what is normal and what isn't to be honest! I don't need 12 hours, just a regular 4 would be fantastic.... Can't believe I just said that.....

for you, Needsweets

I vacillated constantly between 'This is OK...this is OK...' and 'OMG THIS IS NOT FUCKING OK' for about the first 18 months of DS1's life as the first one or two editions of this thread will attest.

As Chocolate said, my expectations have absolutely plummeted with DS2, and there has been no panic at all this time just an unshakeable sense of doom when he was clearly heading the way of his brother

Thanks Elphaba, that's pretty much me. Sometimes he does OK and I'm happy that things are normal then other times I just think he is broken! Worst night EVER last night, I have one word..... Molars! I hate them I hate them I hate them! We have one point of a molar this morning to show for the crappy night though. I felt so bad for him, he was inconsolable at one point which isn't like him at all then after ibuprofen he slept 3.5hrs. He was so tired but so painful. Hope everyone else had a better night!

Needsweets, DD1 was nearly 16 months before she STTN for the first time. And by STTN I mean from 11 till 5ish (which is apparently the 'medical' definition). People have different definitions and expectations. Before children the though of only getting 6 hours sleep seems hellish. Post baby and with horrendous non-sleepers six hours uninterrupted sleep seems like unattainable nirvana

I also asked the doctor at one point. He was a bit old school and said very firmly "there are absolutely no medical conditions that I know of that prevent children from sleeping". Now I do think that is absolute bollocks - reflux being a major case in point - but certainly in DD1s case there was no reason other than she is a bit of a crap sleeper who wakes for pretty much any reason - teeth/hot/cold/noises/nightmares/just awake for no apparent bloody reason.

Which is why she still wakes regularly now, despite being fully able to put herself to bed and go to sleep.

Can I ask those of you who are cosleeping, how do you manage the evenings? So far we have got away with resettling evening wakings and not needing to bring DD in with me (DH has long been in the spare room!) until later on. But tonight he has worked late, I settled her but everytime I leave the room she pops up crying! Now he is downstairs cooking my tea, my bladder is full with a smaller baby kicking it....so I am going to have to pop out at some point.
Weirdly she seems asleep but aware and cries every time I leave. Although this is what made me start bringing her in with me. Yet to work out how this is going to pan out in 3 months time, as surely a newborn crying and feeding is going to be pretty disruptive to a cosleeping toddler.

We also veered between 'bad but normal' and 'why is mt baby broken?!'. Wasn't helped by constant questions about whether she was sleeping any better yet. We have Sen noticeable improvement in the last few months without really doing anything different so am now convinced it is all normal and some are better than others. Like Elph my expectations will be non existent much lower if we have a DC2!

Lili when we co-slept DD always started in her own bed. I think the odd night when she really wouldn't settle I just ended up going to bed early! Can't remember how old your DD is but mine is often harder to settle if DH isn't in even though I always do bedtime.

Currently a mix of good and bad nights here, and early starts too. Today she woke at 540, I changed her and started to give her milk and she promptly passed out on my lap. But now I'm wide awake!

Thanks everyone, quite reassuring to know other people are going through it too. So, after an awful night before, last night DS did 7 - 11, gave ibuprofen for teething then did 11.30 - 5.30 (!!!) Then 5.45 - 6.45. That is the longest stretch we have had since before Christmas! Chocolate can I class this as 'medically' STTN??! Feeling so different than I did this time yesterday morning. Amazing what a bit of sleep can do...