Day 341

Sleep! 

I have regularly been bad at sleeping. All my life, really. I was convinced when I was pregnant that I would suss out how to encourage good sleep in my Wee Daftie. 

I haven’t. 

She isn’t a bad sleeper. She’ll go to sleep with minimal effort when it’s bedtime and when she’s​ genuinely tired. We did establish a really nice evening routine for her when she was weeks old. We did this mainly for us as parents but she has taken to it like a baby to sleep. (On her face, arse in the air)

We’ve had a few interesting periods with her sleep since she arrived. Classic catnapping, only on me usually but not exclusively, during the day to begin with. Lots of falling asleep on the boob. There’s a weird feeling of fear and trepidation when your newborn is asleep on you and you really need to move but moving will result in an awake and crying baby. Pinned to the sofa, trapped by the smallest individual.

Learning how to move and crawl made for a very hard few months. She would roll in her sleep and wake up crying. I can only assume she got a fright. She was over 6 months so we just started putting her to sleep on her tummy as she had great head control. This absolutely helped…until she learned how to crawl.

Sleep crawling is a thing, by the way. That was a fun ten days of scooping Wee Daftie up and putting her back down after she had banged her head on the top of the cot.

What we’re facing at the moment is my worst nightmare​. I can handle the constant waking. Teeth 3 and 4 resulted in waking up every two hours the days before they cut. We’ve done a bit of co-sleeping when she was ill and also when she flung a bowl of water over her bed, bedding and mattress just as she was due to get in her bed. I have no problem when she wants a sleep on Mammy nap. I can happily survive, thrive even, on no sleep whatsoever. What I don’t like is early mornings! 

I’m just not built to be an early riser. Not grumpy or irritable, just better functioning at other, later, times of the day. We were spoiled by a 7:30/8am rising baby. The past week? Somewhere between 5 and 6. Now. I fully appreciate that this is normal. I totally get that parents the world over do this every day. I have just gotten used to my late riser so this week has been a huge shock to my night owl system. 

She’s happy though and that’s the important bit.