Sunday, October 12, 2014

Sleep Deprived much?

Sometimes life just sucks! Not sleeping for 7 months sucks. Your 7 months old waking up every 1-2 hours through the night for no good reason sucks. Your husband thinking night time is automatically your shift sucks. Being tired all the time because you're up all night with your seven month old and in the first trimester with your second baby sucks! LIFE SUCKS!!! I am so mad!!

I seriously need some sleep.

Also, someone apparently already wrote a book about my son.



4 comments:

Nancy said...

Oh! I'm sooooo sorry! And I actually KNOW! My second child did not sleep EVER til about ten months. I tried everything. E v e r y t h i n g. Co sleeping, crying it out, music boxes, on and on. I remember the complete desperation and lack of control as other peoples babies all just . . . slept. I never got more than a 1.5 hr block out of her. Ever. And truly it was one of the hardest trials of my life. Everything felt dark and impossible and all my worst traits as a mother and wife surfaced constantly. I wonder now if there was something going on like severe reflux or some such. In any case, I had blessings, she had blessings, I fasted and fasted, but it was still my cross to bear for so long. Finally I listened to the weird prompting I had to quit nursing her. I wouldn't listen forever because how could that ever be a good or right answer??! She refused bottles, I'd have no other way to get her back to sleep, etc. But, after a day of screaming because she hated her bottle, she finally took it and slept five hours that night. She'd literally NEVER done that. And she just slept longer and longer til she was sleeping from 8 to 7! It was suddenly like birds were chirping and light was shining and the whole world was beautiful again!! I'm so so sorry you are currently going through this. It is impossibly hard. I'll pray you'll find your answer and little chubs will do the miracle flip to "good sleeper" that mine finally did! (And that you won't have to wait til ten freaking months!).

On a positive note, congrats on new baby! It's so much sacrafice and faith to up and make a family. Especially when life and other babies are tricky, but I'm sure Heavenly Father is so proud if you! And, despite all this misery, it's pretty dang awesome to be creating the very people you wil love the most, the very people who will make you laugh and be your favorite and best friends someday! And no small thing to be thee only way some awesome little eternal spirit who has known and loved you forever can get a mortal body and progress in his/her journey and plan. And . . . in six other babies, none have ever ever been such tricky and awful sleepers. Not much comfort when you aren't sleeping now, but a glimmer of hope that it might never be this way again!!!

Loves!!

Unifer said...

Thank you again Nancy, I think you must be my angel! I tend to vent on my blog... haha, but usually I write the vent posts when it is actually as bad as it's going to get! he still isn't sleeping very well and we trying to get him to sleep in his own room. Any advice? But I am getting a lot more sleep. Yeah, the dishes might not have gotten done in a month and my floors need cleaning... and there are two bags of rubbish sitting by the front door still waiting to get taken out... but I am getting a bit more sleep and feeling happier... just as long as my place looks liveable. Thank you for your comment and I am really really hoping that baby nr.2 sleeps really well! T man used to sleep all the time! whenever we went out he would just sleep. We could even take him along to the movies and he would just nurse and sleep through the noise. But then things changed! We started sleeping on our sofa bed in the living room and he slept much longer and better when we did that... until he started teething again... but then moving him into his own room last night was.... not successful! he woke up at 11 and just cried for an hour and a half!! (not to worry, I went in and comforted him every 3-7 minutes, tried music, tried sitting in there with him, even tried moving a mattress in there and laying on the floor holding his hand... ended up just taking him back to bed with me and we both slept really really well!! :D It will all work out... Its just hard sometimes!

Nancy said...

Hahah. Ohhh . . . that is all so familiar -- the mattress and hand holding, etc. etc. I'm glad to hear things are a little better. Life is miserable with no sleep. Sadly I don't have any great advice. My mom sometimes teases and says "If you want answers about kids, ask a mom who only raised one" -- meaning that if you figure it out for one, you think you actually figured it out. . . . It's only when you have another that you realize half the things you "figured out" don't work at all for new kid! The more kids I have, the more I realize I don't really know anything and that there are a million different things that work . . . or don't. ;)

My first baby was super easy. My second was the one that slept NEVER for like a year. I was kind of terrified of a repeat with my third, so I read the book Baby Wise and tried that. I am not a fan really. It works, but I feel like it is way too harsh -- it basically has you forcing baby to a schedule the second they are born. It actually almost stressed me as much as my terrible sleeper because I felt like I HAD to stick to this rigid schedule and like I couldn't ever just let my baby nurse all she wanted or fall asleep on my when she wanted.

By my fourth, I finally found a system that worked for me. I did borrow a few of the concepts from Baby Wise, but not the strictness. I let them do whatever they want at first. Around six to eight weeks, I start loosely trying to get them on a schedule -- get them to eat, then play, then sleep. My main idea is to always start with whatever it is a want them to do. For example, I want to just be able to sing, swaddle them and put them to bed on their own. They always cry initially and I usually only let them for five or so minutes. I end up nursing them to sleep (or back to sleep if it was a cat nap) a lot, but, by about three months, they seem to finally just get it. Usually at that point I can sing and swaddle them and then just put them to bed and they go to sleep. I am more lax with night. For those first few months I just bring them to bed with me every time they wake up, but eventually, I do the same thing at night -- always start with what I want them to eventually accept -- like singing and patting them for a minute and having them just go back to sleep. It seems like eventually they quit fighting and just recognize that as the plan.

Anyway, I think you are doing the right things, eventually, HOPEFULLY, your little man will give in and just accept that he has to SLEEEEEP!

I hope sooner than later for you!!!

Loves,
Nancy

Unifer said...

Hahah I love how wise you are :D Last Friday night mum came over and I spent the whole time in T mans room trying to get him back to sleep and crying to my mum about how tired I am and how this has been going on for far too long! I couldn't do it anymore. So I prayed for patience to deal with it and since then it has been WONDERFUL! I have been less stressed about doing things "the right way" and just do what I can. So now he falls asleep in his room after his bedtime routine which he recognises now. I just sit in there while he falls asleep and don't have to hold his hand or anything, just be there. Then between midnight and 2am he wakes up and I take him into our room where he sleeps in the co sleeper the rest of the nights. He still gets two feeds a night, which we will work on dropping eventually. He had gotten used to sleeping in our bed curled up next to me feeding all night and was getting super clingy during the day too. But he has now gotten used to sleeping in his room half the night and in our room in his co-sleeper the rest of the night, no snuggling before 7am because I really really really love sleeping and i don't do much of that when he is right there nursing all night long! So next step is to drop the night time feeds, then we will work in sleeping in his bed for longer and finally I would really like to be able to do the bed time routine and have him fall asleep without me being in the room. But for now I am HAPPY! sleeping 8 hours a night with only a couple of wake up... which I would have to do anyways to go pee since baby number two is sitting on my bladder. So its fine.

Thank you again for your encouragement and wonderful comments!

HUGS!!
Unnur Erna