When you have a baby, everyone always asks about their sleeping and how many feeds they need in the night. For quite a long time now, Little Man has had a feed around 2 – 3am and then not needed another until 7 – 8am. Sounds great! Except he has such bad tummy troubles that we get woken up regularly with those, instead of feeding. Usually he manages to get through to the 2am feed either without waking or with just one waking, but after that it’s frequent wakings through to the next feed, waking up crying and needing to be winded, burping, farting, and vomiting on us until he feels better and can go back to sleep.
Now the past couple of weeks, we’ve had what should, on the face of it, be an improvement. He’s not waking up crying with wind anything like as much as he used to. Instead he’s developed a weird habit of lifting both legs up in his sleep and slamming them down, which appears to be his own unique way of getting those farts out, and generally making fussy noises and wriggling… All while pretty much asleep.
Usually when this happens he doesn’t need anything more than me to pick up his dummy and maybe switch on his white noise owl (Ollie the Owl, a godsend gift from my lovely sister) for him to fall back into a deep sleep. But it’s often happening pretty much every twenty to forty minutes for several hours towards the end of the night, so I am constantly up and down with him and it is so tiring!
Plus to add insult to injury, his teething has got much worse lately – so often when he’s semi-awake like this, he starts chewing on one hand, and unless I intervene by taking away his hand, giving him his dummy and rubbing his belly until he goes back to sleep properly, he ends up waking up screaming because he’s bitten his hand too hard. Urgh. Sometimes I’m too slow getting to him and he’s already woken himself up a bit chewing on his hand, so then I have to hold him until he falls asleep and then attempt to transfer him into the cot without waking him up, which feels like a Krypton Factor challenge.
I’m hoping that to some extent, as far as his tummy goes, this is a good thing – a sign that his stomach is starting to improve, so his colic is lessening and he can get more wind out without needing our intervention, but from my perspective it’s definitely a case of things getting worse before they get better! Plus, once the teething is added into the mix, it’s absolutely exhausting. Fingers crossed things start to improve soon…
At the moment, I’m feeling like I’m Daytime Mum (stressed out, sleep-deprived) all around the clock and Evening Mum (relaxing in front of the telly with a glass of wine) never gets a look in… I’m also struggling to sleep myself, which I think is related to my post-partum thyroiditis as I seem to be finding it difficult to fall asleep even when I’m really tired. At this point, I’m willing to try pretty much anything to get some sleep, even trying some sleep aid products…
