Saturday, March 29, 2008

Completely at his mercy

So far, we have been taking our sleeping cues from Zachary and working around his natural waking and sleeping pattern - which so far has tended to mean that he sleeps well during the day and then at around 9 at night when we're trying to get to bed for our sleep, he seems to be his most wide awake, just lying gazing around! Feels a bit mean then that we're not all enthusiastic about playing with him!

But all in all, we can't complain about the nights so far - I was speaking to a lady I know today who said that one of her sons, while an extremely happy baby, would wake 9 or 10 times a night and just would not sleep. We're only getting 3 or 4 wakes.

We have however been plagued by endless articles and advice about getting your baby into a sleep / bedtime routine so that they learn to distinguish between night and day, and also start to get used to sleeping for longer periods at night.

Although he's only 3 weeks old, we thought we'd have a go and start a routine for him from tonight, but not too stringent because we think it's too early for anything really strict. The plan was feed, change into sleepsuit, read story, put to bed upstairs. Start this whole thing at about half 7/8 and then try not to bring him down again - doing any other feeds upstairs.

Well...got the feed in. Then he fell asleep so we decided not to change him in case it woke him. Put him to bed upstairs. We then spent an anxious 20 minutes or so with the baby monitor stuck to one or other of our ears to check he was okay. Could hear him grunting, gurgling and moving around. I went upstairs to check and he was fine, if a little jiggly. Then he got hiccups and we sat downstairs listening to him hiccup for a few minutes (no, of course we were not laughing!) before he began crying. We're complete suckers and went and brought him down basically straightaway and he's now lying on his daddy quite happily hiccuping away. He has also now been changed due to a sicking up incident in bed - he really needs a hairwash tomorrow...

Oh well, there's always another day!

2 comments:

Niles said...

Bedtime story at 3 weeks!?

Kathryn said...

Well, more hoping that the sound of our voices will soothe him than he that he'll appreciate it! On that basis Leigh read him an article from the TV Guide this morning!