Is anyone else following the extremely vague and lazy "wait it out and hope it spontaneously resolves itself, maybe solids/crawling/walking/time/eventual night-weaning/magic/bribery once she can talk or be reasoned with" baby sleep plan?
We're nipple-deep in the four-month regression, which followed fast from the 8-week-jabs endless night poo era, then the 12-week hourly waking growth spurt. Throw early teething,
a late tongue tie division and a crap reaction to 16-week jabs into the mix – all in the same week! Which is when she migrated from Snuzpod to sleeping in my armpit – and you get a shitstorm of night wakings, my solution to which is:
plonk baby (now 21 weeks) in bed with me each night – after first making comatose with boob after rock-solid bedtime routine – and reapply boob as needed. Sometimes sleepily snuggling works in the middle of the night. Sometimes she wakes, babbles, pats around to check I'm there, and resettles. (Rare as a unanimous AIBU? thread, but like sunshine when it happens!)
Sometimes we start the night with a 3-hour chunk, other times 45 minutes. Some nights she wakes up only 4 times, others what feels like 4,000. Very little crying unless more teeth/colds, in which case howling then calpol and boob and a lie-in if she grants it. (I know the advice is to wake at the same time each day but (a) the baby wakes herself at the crack of dawn most days and when she doesn't (b) if she was up for two hours howling because of her teeth, I'm not going to enforce a wake-up for the sake of some Gina Ford nonsense.)
The 45-minute wake-ups are guaranteed if I put her down in her sidecar crib now, or even if leave the room – sometimes she wakes straight away if I try to swap with DP. Even in deep sleep she has a batlike sense for my being in the room. She generally starts the night starfished on the bed; as the night goes on she gets more unsettled and likes my armpit to snuggle into best. Perhaps it's the woolly mammoth furriness?
She's not great at feeding lying down but I'm persevering because I'm lazy. Occasionally I attempt the pull-off thing of putting my finger in her mouth to delatch once she's asleep but I'm too knackered to do it consistently or time it to gradually reduce feeds, I think I'm doing it in a half-hearted "gosh I really should sort this sleep thing". Mostly I do it so I can go to sleep if I'm feeding sitting up. I've no idea how to shhhh-pat; PUPD seems like an awful lot of effort with a heavy baby when I could be lying down, and deeply confusing; gradual chair or whatever makes me want to weep with exhaustion more than the current situation; CC or CIO is neverrrrrrr going to happen. On the other hand, I have wistful recollections of evenings, of my lovely DP, of times when I ate dinner somewhere other than over a snoozing baby's head in the dark...
Basically is anyone else doing what I'm doing to improve their baby's sleep, i.e. not very much at all, and wants to commiserate while we ride it out, slash create bad habits, construct towering Jengas of rods for backs, build sleep crutches, and generally arse it up? Any experienced "totally winged it and it worked out fine" mothers want to share delightful stories of "Oh one day he just pushed the boob away, fell asleep and did 12 hours and it's been a fairytale ever since, I got my bed and my sex life back" lazy parenting magic?
DP & I are softies who plan on an open-door policy of "if the kid can't sleep because of nightmares or growing pains, come on in our bed, they're only little", have fond memories of childhood shenanigans of sleeping on the landing or sneaking down to see what the grown-ups are doing, BUT also have no interest in "giant floor bed co-sleeping til 20" and quite like each other and the idea of the kid in her own room eventually, it would be nice to have some hope.
::rambles on in a sleep-deprived manner while teething DD snores on my shoulder, preps coffee machine for tomorrow, hopes there are other chaotic parents out there doing the absolute least::