Sherlock and The sleep thief

We have reached 5 and a half months and the concept of sleep in the traditional sense is well and truly forgotten. You have realigned your expectations and now consider a good night sleep to be if you are only woken twice between 10pm and 4am.

We have faced newborn feeds, sleep regressions, moving into his own room, learning to self-soothe, teething and vaccinations. Yet, it never gets better you just change your routine and try to convince yourself it’s an improvement.

There have been times, the routine has become so confusing, we both stand awake at 3am unsure whose meant to be there. Inevitably you then debate who will stay. (This is only because you know whoever goes back to bed, gets up earlier.)

We currently face the challenge of fully waking between sleep cycles. This means he wakes irregularly and without a reason. The result is I now spend an obscene amount of time watching him try to put himself to sleep. As he is pretty new to this he has adopted, what can only be described as idiotic methods to achieve this. But here are some of my personal favourites:

The possessed hand – His own hand, creeps upward, you try multiple times to place it down, but he will manage to sneak this past you at every opportunity. When it reaches his face it will steal the dummy, tickle the face or rub the eye, whichever method will wake him up.

Fighting inner demons – his head thrashes from left to right, arms raising and falling with all his might until at last the legs launch upward with fiercesome force. No one knows who this opponent is, but he will not sleep until they have been conquered.

Plotting – hands rub together, whilst he makes a progressively louder buzzing noise. I imagine he is plotting new ways to steal my sleep.

During all this you will alternate between the nursery chair, sitting in the hall watching a camera or setting timers on your phone to go back in. Eventually you will just pray and beg for them to sleep. Unsure which technique worked you will try it all again for the next sleep.

After a particularly difficult evening Paul will always say “why does he have to do this?”. I will update him with the newest development stage. However this week he responded with “why do you always know this information, when it can’t help us.” I came to the realisation that to cope I need the reassurance of knowing this is all for a reason, whereas he just wants to know when it will be over and can he make it better. The only common ground we have here is we are tired, confused by his behaviour and unsure if we are meant to be doing anything else.

So truth be told, this month had no valuable lessons learnt. Just the realisation that knowing the above information won’t help you, but at least it will all change again in a week.

I’ve made an exceptional human being, that is already a considerably better person than me (and he still sh*ts himself). I feel I’m exceeding expectations as a mum. I make puree, I go to baby groups, I sing, I dance, my house is clean(ish) and we cuddle. But truth be told I still don’t love the person I am, I’m crankier, I take twice as long to problem solve and I rarely talk about things that aren’t babies. However, I am getting there, it’s ok to still be overwhelmed and confused.