5-Month-Old Angel

Jude has been perfectly delightful lately. He smiles, giggles and babbles constantly. Just yesterday he discovered that his toes reach his mouth, and it's the cutest thing in the world to see him with his bum in the air, hands grasping his feet and his toes between his gums. Don't be fooled. If you see a cute photo of a baby, there's a very good chance it isn't a newborn. Most likely that cute, smiling little bundle of joy is at least 5 months old.

He's also taken to sleeping a lot during the day. He doesn't sleep for too long, but he sleeps like clockwork. 1 hour of sleep followed by 2 hours of awake time then back to sleep for another hour. However, this means he has 4 day-time sleeps which is more than other babies his age. It is a bit of problem for trying to organise my day, especially now that I'm going to Mothers Group.

I've introduced him to solid food. So far he's eating breakfast and dinner but I'm going to add in lunch (I guess) tomorrow (I have to buy some more food first). Breakfast and dinner are easy to implement, but lunch will be a bit tricky since (a) I have not (and never will) force Jude onto a strict routine just for my own convenience and (b) I'm not sure how to manage lunch if I am out-and-about. Anyway, I'm sure it will sort itself out, these things have a way of just working.

Lately Jeremy has been taking the night shift. Since Jude decided to wean himself off the boob, Jeremy can bottle feed him as easily as I can, and since Jeremy can get back to sleep after waking up in the middle of the night and I can't, it makes more sense this way.

However, after 8 solid months of no sleep (including the third trimester when I had pelvic displacement and the pain kept me awake), my body clock was completely out of whack and I just can't sleep any more, so I took some sleeping pills for a few nights to reprogram my sleep patterns and it helped. I have since dropped the sleeping pills and I'm now taking natural melatonin. Last night was a bit difficult for some reason, I think because I had a set-back the night before when the neighbours decided to do aerobics in the middle of the night (or something, they probably came home drunk and decided it was a good time for Dance Dance Revolution).

I just have to keep working on it. I know I'm not alone. I know there are other mothers out there who can't get back to sleep after feeding their babies, either (although I am yet to meet one), but I wonder if I'm the only mother who still can't sleep even now I don't have to get up to feed my baby.

Getting Baby to Sleep

I'm not glad that I paid $200 for antenatal classes that turned out to be entirely useless. They didn't prepare me for the reality of what I experienced in giving birth, nor did they prepare me for the reality of what comes next.

We were told babies follow a routine of feed-play-sleep (or simply feed-sleep for newborns). However, Jude did not care for supposed routines. From week 4 to week 8 he flat out refused to sleep during the day, thus making it impossible for me to do anything (like eat lunch or get dressed) during the day.

It was incredibly frustrating. Yes, some babies do follow by-the-book routines but some babies don't and it's unfair to disarm expectant mothers by pretending otherwise. I was completely oblivious to how severely my life would be turned upside down and dumped on its head by having a baby that didn't nap during the day, and by day I mean from 8am until 11 o'clock at night.

Almost all babies start off life waking every 3 or 4 hours (some every 2 hours) through the night. For me this meant that Jude feeds at 10pm, then 2am, then 5am, then 8am and I try to sleep in between. Some babies grow out of this pattern and start skipping one of those night-time feeds. According to one of my baby bibles (which I rushed out to buy as soon as I realised the antenatal classes had been a flat-out waste of money), babies can't really sustain themselves overnight until they're about 5kgs because their stomach is too small prior to that.

Jude was born smaller than average and at nearly 10 weeks of age he still hasn't reached 5kgs. Many babies will reach 5kgs as early as 6 weeks of age. This means that while all those mums with babies the same age as Jude are complaining they can only sleep from 8pm until 7am (what?), I am still getting up twice in the middle of the night to feed Jude and I leap with joy on the rare occasion that I get 5 hours in a row of beautiful, blissful, uninterrupted sleep.

Note: Not all babies start skipping night feeds once they reach the golden weight of 5kgs. Some babies still wake for feeds at 1 year of age or even older.

Happily, Jude has started sleeping more during the day allowing me time to catch up on much needed tasks like cleaning my bathroom (which was a bit skanky after 8 weeks of mold cultivation). I'm not sure if we've done anything to encourage the sleeping or Jude's doing it on his own, but we have tried very hard by putting him to bed when we think he's tired. There are supposed to be clear signs that a baby is tired, but Jude's signs are subtle and we function on guess work.

I've learned through trial and error that Jude likes it when I sit by his bassinet and read him a story. He's not interested in the pictures and I'm sure he has no idea what I'm saying, but a reading voice is different from a conversation voice, there's a certain rhythm to the written word that helps calm Jude and lull him towards sleep. My aim is simply to quieten him to a state of peace so he can put himself to sleep when I leave the room.

Jeremy's technique is to sing him a medley of songs with the same tune, like the ABC and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

It's been a long, confusing and exhausting journey to help Jude sleep. The scary part is, what works today might suddenly stop working tomorrow. With babies you just never know. As my GP said, as soon as you think there's a routine developing something happens and everything changes.

Pregnancy and Insomnia

There are a million reasons why I'm not sleeping so well lately. Number 1 contender is probably the mug of raspberry leaf tea I keep drinking right before bed. That's got to account for at least 3 trips to the toilet in the early part of the night.

Then there's the misaligned pelvis and associated hip pain that makes sleeping quite uncomfortable, despite the Snoogle body pillow having helped somewhat in that respect.

On top of physical causes, such as a full bladder and pain, there's the mental aspect as well. I close my eyes and start thinking about everything: baby, pregnancy, labour, husband, house, money, jobs, family ... you name it, it's floating up there in the dark recesses of my mind, emerging when I want to sleep.

Jeremy has been trying to go to bed earlier than adults usually go to bed because he's always tired and he has to work at either 8am or 8:30am. Sometimes he likes to walk to work, so he sets off earlier than he really needs to. This means I'm waking up at the crack of dawn with him. I try to sleep in after he leaves but I get hungry for breakfast and I have to get up, and so begins another day with heavy eyelids and a constant desire to sleep.

I have finished work, but I have a lot of personal projects I want to be working on. I sit down to my computer and my head screams at me "please don't make me think, I'm too tired." My body wants to nap, but I've never been good at taking naps during the day. The only time I can nap is when I'm exhausted to the point of passing out, which often happens when I'm travelling around the world on a limited time frame, but not when I'm sitting around the house doing very little (because I'm too tired to do anything, damn this catch-22).

Everywhere I turn people keep telling me to get lots of rest before the baby comes because after that I'll never sleep again, but in what universe are they living that getting lots of rest at this late stage in pregnancy is actually possible?