After 10 months and 1 week we finally had our first night of what I can begin to call sleeping through.
The hardest part of having a baby is without a doubt the sleep deprivation. It is truly horrible and as my health visitor pointed out "there is a reason it is used as a form or torture".
During the last 10 months I have ranged from exhausted, grumpy, irritable. Suffered with dizziness and headaches, walked into door/door frames through exhaustion and even questioned whether I needed to see my GP about post natal depression.
I resisted the GP, not because I cared what he diagnosed but because I knew the first thing he would do would be to slide a depression questionnaire over the desk to me and I knew that grief and a lack of sleep would have me answering yes to every single question. He could prescribe me whatever he wanted but until I got some sleep nothing was likely to improve.
Thankfully I was put in touch with a lovely lady through my health visitor, one who had suffered endless nights of sleeplessness and understood its impact on a mums life. She agreed that a good nights sleep would clear my head and allow me to consider whether I needed to visit my GP.
After discussing a range of approaches and attempting everything I could to encourage Munchie to sleep for longer than 90 minutes at a time it soon became apparent that he had serious sleep associations. He could not get to sleep without either a dummy or me feeding him. Without a doubt one of my biggest regrets from breastfeeding was feeding on demand and allowing Munchie to fall asleep whilst feeding. I had made a rod for my own back.
There is only so long anyone can function on so little sleep. The prospect of returning to work and driving 80 miles a day on that amount of sleep was not only terrifying it was also dangerous. There was no way it would be possible and yet not working was equally impossible.
I know many many people are hugely against controlled crying. All I would say to these people is no parent wants to let their child cry. Listening to them upset breaks your heart but just imagine how low and desperate a parent must feel to reach a stage where they are ready to try controlled crying.
Understandable I reached that stage. It was the last thing I wanted to do but I was at breaking point. I was not "damaging him for life" I was teaching him a new skill, how to sleep and also improving the quality of life for myself, Mr C and Snaffles. We all needed sleep.
It has been long and hard and dropping the feeds has been key to reclaiming sleep. Dropping the middle of the night feeds worked to a degree, Munchie has been sleeping from 7pm until around 4am from the end of November. However since going back to work these early morning feeds are killing me. Getting back into bed at 4:30 am and knowing your alarm will go off shortly makes returning to sleep near impossible.
This week I have weaned Munchie off his early morning feed. He now only has a bedtime feed from me. Finally this weekend Munchie slept from 7pm until 5:30am. He woke up happy and shouting for Daddy and more than made up for the lack of a breastfeed with 3 bowls of porridge!
Yes it has taken a little crying to get here but we're happy, he's happy. That's all that matters to me. readmore »»


.jpg)
.jpg)

.jpg)



.jpg)









