How does your baby sleep?

*To the tune of Mary, Mary quite contrary*

Mum, Mum, the cranky bum

How does your baby sleep?

With screams and cries and lullabies

and mum on the floor in a heap. 

Sleep. Parents most talked about 5 letter word in the first 2 years of a child life. Our lives revolve around how many hours we get, how many hours we lost, how many tactics we can use and how much sanity we can cling to.

In the beginning, I found the lack of sleep a shock. Yes, we all heard that babies get hungry a lot. We all know that they like to cry during the night. Yet for some reason I was still shocked. Stella was feeding every hour during her first week of life, giving me one hell of a bender. I was starting to see pillow mirages and falling asleep whilst trying to nurse. When I did have the chance to get 2.5 hours sleep as the feeds decreased, it was near impossible. Her second week of life bought a new sleeping hurdle. She would sleep for a solid five hours during the day, yet still woke every three hours at night. She had a cat-napping addiction and would not listen to her parents pleas for rehabilitation.

As the months passed, her sleeping habits changed. Never really gaining stability. Sometimes being terrible, sometimes being incredible.

Now, at 14 months old...she sleeps like...well, like Stella. She has her own patterns and habits and her own rebel baby attitude. She sleeps enough, and I guess that's all that matters. The refusal to have daytime naps and sleep ins past 6:00am are frustrating yet manageable, I think as parents we adjust to our babies routines and their routines soon become our routines. I now wake when she is about to wake and feel like crashing when she crashes.

What excites me beyond normal levels of excitement is the thought that one day, she will 13 years old. She will sleep in til midday and stay up to midnight, she will want to make up for all the sleep she didn't get as a baby. She will be a bundle of sleepy, lazy goodness. What I am yet to decide is whether I will get my revenge and throw open the bedroom curtains or become a middle aged leisure living lazy bundle myself.

This will make you giggle.

How does your baby sleep? With screams and cries and lullabies? With you on the floor in a heap? How do you deal with poor sleeping habits and lack of sleep? Did you too experience shock at the manner in which sleep engulfed your life?


Plenty of love...