Sleep
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Thursday, June 12th, 2008Why is it that when you most need caffeine to cope with sleep deprivation, you can’t have it? Unless you want a baby that is awake more than it is already (see my Tweets over there on the right, where I’m already complaining).
Every one of my children was up at some point last night. And nobody’s even sick.
Is there some sort of conspiracy to drive me insane? Is there?
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Posted in Sleep, Babies
Croup, croup and then more croup
Monday, October 22nd, 2007I’m on the boat at nearby Longleat stately home and one of the seals has flip-flopped itself onto the deck and is barking at me for the cup of fish I am holding in my hand.
It keeps barking, its tail knocking incessantly on the deck.
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I stumble out of bed to find a croupy William standing at my bedroom door. ‘I’m poorly,’ he tries to say, his voice like a teenage boy who’s hit puberty.
For the next three nights he sleeps in my bed. Over the last four and a half years he has had all manner of illnesses and fevers but any attempts to get him into my bed - where it is easier to look after him - have been met with fierce resistance. Until this bout of croup.
So I don’t have to get out of bed to administer repeat cuddles, medicine, drinks and so on, but a thrashing, feverish four year old does not a good bedfellow make.
However on the fourth morning I know he is better when he declares my bed ‘boring’.
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One of the downsides of Harry being at a school other than our local one is that when one of his brothers is sick I have no-one else to do the school run. So I have had to drag a poorly, feverish William out on an hour long round trip when he would rather be on the sofa watching children’s television. (But then one of the downsides of Harry being at school is that I have to do an hour and twenty minutes in the car every morning to drop two at school when I would rather be on the sofa drinking coffee and watching television. That alone seems reason enough to be homeschooling, to my mind. Not to mention that I could probably cover an entire day’s school work in the two plus hours I am spending in the car everyday.)
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On that fourth evening Harry stumbles out of bed, footsteps across the ceiling, the telltale bark croaking weedily down the stairs. Oh goody! - another three days of looking after a different feverish, poorly son.
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Last night, Ben wakes, struggling to breath. Mama, mama, he whimpers pathetically, his arm flailing through the cot bars searching contact with any part of me for reassurance that he is not dying. Even better! - when the baby is sick I can’t even plonk him in front of a video and leave him to rest. And his IgA deficiency leaves him particularly susceptible to respiratory infections, an added worry.
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And so I sit here, eyes burning with tiredness, cursing the mother who Friday ten days ago at preschool stood next to me (I mean, how brazen!) and said to the teacher, ‘Sam is sounding a bit croupy today, I’ve given him some paracetemol, but he seems fine to be here now. But you know, I will pick him up early I think, because he’s not well.’
Yes, not well. At school, spreading croup. Thank you. Thank you so much.
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Posted in Sleep, Daily Life
Teaching a baby to sleep by himself
Thursday, April 12th, 2007Controlled crying. Two words that strike fear into my already overly-emotional heart.
Last night my fifteen month old’s screams of abandonment and indignation filled the monitor airwaves for nearly an hour leaving me shaken and feeling rotten to the core.
For I have a secret: in order to move Ben out of my bed and into his cot at Christmas time - which was becoming pressing for fear of him falling off the bed before we could get to him when he woke - I couldn’t bring myself to do it properly. So I would lay next to him, sometimes holding his hand, sometimes not as he drifted off. If he woke during the night I simply stretched my arm through the cot bars and he would return blissfully to sleep, often caressing my arm as if there was nothing more perfect on this Earth. This worked fine for several months until recently when bedtime has become playtime and I was lying in bed for fifteen minutes one week, thirty the next waiting for him to finish whatever play he had decided to perform for me each evening.
So last night I steeled myself, put him down, kissed him softly and left the room. Then I came straight back in again, lay him down, stroked his back and left again. Then I came straight back in, lay him down, stroked his back and - well you get the picture. I repeated this for an hour until he fell asleep. He might as well have written a sign and put it at the end of his cot ‘ASLEEP UNDER PROTEST’ the way he was lying, limbs at every angle, the least angelic pose he could muster as his body gave way to sleep.
At naptime today I steeled myself for worse crying as he anticipated the misery to come. It took two minutes of half-arsed crying before he fell into his daily afternoon coma.
This evening he cried as I laid him down and then stopped - clearly too much trouble. As I left the room he started chatting. Chat, chat, chat. He’s not asleep and I’m sure there’ll be some crying in a minute but he’s up there getting himself to sleep and I’m down here doing something else.
I cannot tell you how much I was dreading doing this. His failure to thrive, his eating and his sleeping have been so difficult to deal with - as much in my head as in any practical sense - that I felt there was no way I could have another baby. Absolutely no way I could cope with anything like this again. And that felt devastating.
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Posted in Sleep, Parenting
Sleep deprivation and its fallout
Thursday, November 16th, 2006Nightimes around here are like an affair with the bad boy of the neighbourhood: they seduce you with longing but leave you feeling tricked and used. The dark hours lying awake, crushingly, stupendously tired but forced awake by a crying or hungry baby or by a toddler with nightmares or coldiness, are desperate and there have been too many of them recently.
Ben is halfway through a dairy-free, soya-free diet to see if he is allergic or intolerant to either. So far the only thing it has proved is that I don’t have enough milk to replace the calories he is no longer getting from the (little) food he was eating. We are also awaiting results for tests for malabsorptive disorders like coeliac disease. Depending on the results of those he will face either an endoscopy or a colonoscopy, x-rays and other invasive sorts of things. It is of some consolation that he has no way of knowing in advance what lies ahead.
He remains chirpy. He is cruising. He smiles and chats to strangers. But he is painfully thin, pale and still constipated (the note on the board for tomorrow reads, if Ben no sweetcorn in poop then give suppository - for I ‘track’ and compare progress of sweetcorn and blueberries through the three boys. And I certainly think that’s a skill I will be able to put on my future cv/resume). At home he is irritable, tired, unwilling or unable to eat and generally not so much fun to be around. I say unwilling to eat because it has occured to me that there may be a psychological reason for his not-eating. At first I considered that the noise level in the house might be frightening him so now the dogs are locked out, the boys are bribed to sit and eat with a moderate level of noise but it hasn’t made any difference. I tried him in the highchair, on my lap, milk before, no milk before, soft food, hard food, little bits, larger bits (the one thing he is insistent on is NO SPOON FEEDING, EVER), off my plate, from the boys. Nothing makes any difference. Then this evening, I sat on the floor with the baby, a banana and my dogs, my parents’ dogs and a neat trick of throwing small bits of banana into the dogs waiting, salivating mouths (hey, whatever it takes, right?) and the baby ate pretty much the whole banana. His previous best was two small mouthfuls. This makes me happy but worried. He CAN eat a banana! He wants to eat a banana! He could be putting on weight before my eyes! But then, he’s playing me! There’s some psychological reason for not eating, which he forgot about while distracted by four spaniels dancing in front of his face for lobbed-about bits of banana. And what worries me about that is, if there is a psychological reason for not eating, nine times out of ten it is because of something the parents are doing (I watch Supernanny, I know about these things).
This morning, having had three hours sleep, two and a half hours awake, and one more hour’s sleep (that last hour made me feel even worse on waking, I shouldn’t have bothered) I was withdrawn, feeling sick with tiredness. The baby woke beside me chatting and cooing and doing everything to elicit our regular morning cuddle. When I sat him up with a toy, stonily faced, and avoided looking at him because I felt so angry and tired he looked at me in such confusion. It was only as I saw his face eventually start to crumble that I realised what a bitch I was being, to my ten month old baby!, and I picked him up and let him nuzzle into my neck. If I can be like that deliberately, what else is he picking up from me under the surface, subconsciously? And is his not-eating a manifestation of my irritability at my chronic tiredness or a manifestation of his unhappiness if I shout at the older two (thankfully not often but it does happen)? These are the questions that plague me in those long dark hours when I should be asleep.
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Posted in Sleep, Parenting
Sleep Training
Tuesday, July 4th, 2006These are the two words which strike the most fear into my heart. Those and Controlled Crying. And possibly Spread ‘Em.
Youngest Son, now a bouncing six-month-old, is refusing to go to sleep without being rocked in my arms. So three times a day you can find me pacing the hallways while he decides whether or not he is going to drop off. Sometimes he looks at me and giggles, because it’s such a Big Game. Yes Ben, that’s just how I see it too, a Great Big Game. With two preschoolers to look after, meals to get on the table and laundry to get done (oh God, so MUCH laundry) I don’t have the inclination, not to mention the time, to pace the hallways.
Sometimes we go out in the car and he falls asleep (I never thought I’d love the school run so much). Sometimes we go out in the stroller (him, not me) and he falls asleep (I never thought I’d love walking so much and Lord knows I need to do some before my not-so-recently-pregnant belly sags below my knees - no-one has asked me when my next baby is due, but it’s only a matter of time). But unless I drive for just the right amount of time - heaven forbid it should be too short or too long - or unless I walk at just the right speed - not so slow as to give him too much to look at, nor so fast as to keep him awake by bouncing him out of the stroller - I end up at home where I am pacing the hallways sometimes singing, sometimes pretending I am talking on the phone, sometimes actually talking on the phone, sometimes making random lists into my dictaphone because I’m that anally-retentive, or sometimes singing a random list into my dictaphone and telephone at the same time (I’m a mother, I can seriously multitask).
Plus, he’s a fat little bugger and my arms don’t need the work out anymore. Bingo wings? You gotta be joking, there’s not an ounce of fat on my upper arms. It all went to my stomach.
But at six months old he’s too young to do controlled crying with. I know I need to rock him until he’s sleepy and then place him in the cot so he actually falls asleep in the cot. I KNOW THAT. But then he doesn’t sleep. At all. And so I spend even more time pacing the halls, singing, dictaphoning, and also this time swearing, until he is sleepy and then I put him in his cot again whereupon he wakes. And then doesn’t sleep.
I thought about leaving the dictaphone in his cot on playback with me singing, dictaphoning, telephoning and swearing but he isn’t fooled. I thought about hypnotising him by leaving messages on the dictaphone: “You feel sleepy. Your mother smells of baby vomit, get away from her.” I left a milky smelling cloth in his cot to remind him of me but it just went rancid and made the room stink.
This is my third baby. Someone should have told him he’s meant to be the easy baby. Perhaps I’ll put that on the dictaphone.
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Posted in Sleep
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