baybeasts

When bean and I are confused, worried, planning something new, or just feel like it, we do research.

So when we reached the end of our tether last week, we ordered a whole swag of books from the ABA’s mail order service:

The Fussy Baby Book
The Attachment Parenting Book
The No-Cry Sleep Solution

and an ABA booklet called ‘Understanding Wakeful Babies’.

It was such a relief to have everything we have been doing confirmed, after the patronising and dire warnings in the Baby Whisperer book (I would burn it only it’s not ours), which was all we’d had to go on up to this point. But also somewhat dispiriting because none of our enlightened parenting was making him any easier to settle.

Even so, I completely lost it at about 4am yesterday morning, but our midwife has this uncanny skill of showing up just when we are falling apart (without us contacting her at all - it’s seriously spooky) and dropped in last night and sorted us out, again. She reminded us that he is just a baby, a wakeful, intense, ‘high-need’ baby but ultimately just a baby doing his thing. And we need to chill out and work out how to keep ourselves sane, rather than keeping on thinking that we are doing something wrong or that there is a problem we need to fix.

We had a big breakthrough yesterday too, which is helping me feel more sane - he finally consented to sleep in his bassinet! It was very exciting to be able to put him down (up to now he’s been pretty clear about wanting to be held most of the time, and we’ve been happy to oblige him but it is exhausting, especially overnight). I think we’ll be sleeping in shifts for a while yet though - even in the bassinet he needs resettling every 30-40 minutes and will only sleep for two lots of 30-40 minutes (ie 1-1.5 hrs in total) before he wants to get up again for food and hanging out.

Sadly, I think he is just not that keen on the family bed idea - he doesn’t feed to sleep in the bed (or anywhere) and often wriggles and cries even when he is held in our arms or literally on one of our chests. On the few occasions he does go to sleep in our bed he wakes up at the slightest movement by either of us - the other night bean moved the doona by 2 mm and he lost it. He’s a sensitive little thing…

It’s so ironic that we consciously chose these ‘controversial’ ways of parenting (feeding to sleep, family bed) but he totally has other ideas - it’s a big parenting lesson already, and it’s only been five weeks.