We have always had sleep issues with Nathan, whether it be that he doesn’t get enough sleep, catnaps, or is just plain difficult to get to sleep. That’s where we are at at the moment, he’s difficult to get to sleep. I have a few strategies that I can use during the day, but at night it generally comes down to a breastfeed. The breastfeed starts off with wriggling, leg waving, kicking and generally trying to do acrobatic tricks (actually, I sometimes wonder if I’d still be breastfeeding if it wasn’t such a useful sleep tool, I’m seriously not enjoying it at the moment) and gradually Nathan relaxes until he’s asleep. The whole thing takes about half an hour. If he doesn’t breastfeed to sleep then I’m stuck with the ‘lie on the bed and tell Nathan to lie down and put his head on the pillow for an hour and a half’ method. This usually involves me getting annoyed with Nathan for wanting to stand up, get out of bed, talk, etc and I try to make him lie still by holding him, but that results in lots of crying, so I let him go and we’re back to where we were. I sing, I breastfeed, I talk to him, cuddle him, pat him on the back….anything that might help him to relax for a few minutes. I hate this method of getting him to sleep, it takes so very long to achieve the desired outcome and there are usually many tears along the way.
Both of these methods took place in our bed, and once Nathan is asleep I would transfer him to his cot/toddlers bed (we took the side off his cot ages ago in the hopes he’d like being in it more if he could get in and out). When he woke in the night I’d quickly transfer him back to our bed, and most of the time he would crawl up onto my pillow and go back to sleep within minutes. If the transfer to our bed took a bit longer, or I tried to settle him in his bed first, then it would be at least an hour and a half before he would go back to sleep. We went through a lovely period when Nathan would sleep the entire night in his bed about 50% of the time without waking, but the last few months we’ve been lucky if he slept in his bed all night once a fortnight.
To be honest, most of the time I love having the little munchkin in our bed. Obviously he feels safe being so close to Mummy and Daddy, and he has always slept so much better there than on his own. However, sometimes he pushes against me so hard that he literally pushes me out of bed, at other times it’s Andrew who ends up at weird angles on the bed because Nathan is taking his space. Other times he sleeps perpendicular to Andrew and I, and takes up more than half the bed. We have also been wondering what’s going to happen when the baby is born, because I’m planning on feeding him/her in bed during the night rather than doing the silly ‘fall asleep on the couch while feeding in the night’ approach that I started doing with Nathan until I realised that feeding in bed meant I got heaps more sleep! There is no way that a baby would fit in bed with Andrew, Nathan and I! So we decided to take some steps to get Nathan out of our bed….not out of our room, just out of our bed!
Last weekend we bought Nathan a single mattress, and this weekend we found a bed frame for him. We brought it home, put it together (with Nathan’s help), put new sheets, doona and doona cover on his bed and told him that it’s his big bed and we hope he likes sleeping in it. Last night was his first night in his bed. We read books in his bed, said goodnight, turned out the light and I fed him to sleep in his own bed. He woke up once in the night, I jumped in bed with him and within minutes he was asleep again. I consider this to be a success…a whole night in my bed without a little wriggly worm kicking me. 🙂
Operation goodnight sleeptight continues….I have hopes that Nathan will be sleeping through the night again soon, and in his own bed, but only time will tell.
Testing out his new bed when we finished putting it together
Reading a book in his new bed
well done love his doona cover xx to u all