I have just read The No-Cry Sleep Solution, borrowed from Lisa. From this, I have learned that Bernard sleeps well, at least in the sense that we usually get a good four or five hour block most nights, followed by a one-hour feed and then another couple of hours’ sleep.

We have three main issues:

• Most sleep is still in our bed. Last night I transferred him successfully to the bedside crib, and lay awake listening to his grunts and snuffles and wheezes. Turns out I now sleep more soundly if we both fall asleep in bed, feeding. We both need to unlearn the co-sleeping habit.
• Sources suggest that three daytime naps of around two to three hours would be good at this stage. We definitely don’t have anything like this much daysleep. We might get one good nap and a couple of snoozes, but that’s all. I have to learn to recognise sleepiness and somehow capitalise upon it; at present, all crying is treated as a demand for food. He is getting quite round: 8lb 6oz at the last weighing.
• Maybe this is a repetition of the last two points. At the moment, his best sleeps are achieved by feeding in bed, or driving him around. He is not bad at going back to sleep when he wakes in the night, but I want to know how to “put him down” for a nap. I barely put him down at all, although I do occasionally get someone else to hold him. In the melting hot weather, this has been uncomfortable for both of us, but he continues to complain loudly if transferred to crib or moses basket or bouncy chair. I don’t like it when he cries. It sounds too much like there is woe and misery in his world, and I know it’s my job to make all that go away.

So that’s our project.

Weekends are good, though. Pete enables me to get good naps while he and Bernard gurn at each other for a couple of hours. They are cute.

[Things I would have included if my head was remotely organised.]

• It’s not the sleep deprivation, or the constant feeding, that get to me. It’s the chaos.
• How did I get away with being so lazy and selfish for so many years? Now I have no choice but to be on call 24/7, I can’t imagine a return to the old order.
• Chaos. Utter chaos. I don’t want to ginaford the poor baby, but I need some kind of routine, just for my own sanity. I keep telling myself that we will settle down in a few weeks, and I can’t expect any kind of order yet, but it’s hard to wait.
• Having said that, the last month has passed in the blink of an eye. The days don’t just all run into one, but they feel like they are completely compressed into one. I have no idea what we did yesterday.
• Is it okay for him to suck his toys, to soothe himself to sleep?
• Every morning at around 7, Pete takes Bernard away for half an hour or 45 minutes, and I sleep. It is the best sleep I get, because it is the only time he is not in the room where I have to listen to him breathe, and I know he is safe with his dad. If anyone else takes him away, I don’t sleep.
• This morning Bernard fell asleep on Pete’s chest, making Pete over an hour late for work. It’s not that he couldn’t possibly be moved, but that both parties were so very comfortable, they just didn’t want to. They were very cute.
• Chaos makes me feel stressed. I knew that caring for a newborn would be hard work, but I never quite grasped the details of what that meant.
• I have a perfect, beautiful little baby, who has bright eyes and a bushy tail. He looks at me all trustful and sweet. Then his face gets red and he bawls at me, but it doesn’t matter.

There are days when I honestly want this roller coaster to stop. The hot weather has been horrible for all of us: very little sleep, very cross baby, and constant feeding. Since the storm on Saturday it has been much cooler, but the non-stop feeding goes on. My sources all told me that it gets “better” after four weeks, but every feed seems to take longer than the last, and the periods in between them feel shorter. I don’t know if this is just the warped perception of a sleep-deprived, anxious mother, or if I actually do spend 20 hours a day with a baby glued to my breast.

The sleeping project has not progressed at all. Bernard sleeps for nothing like the 16 hours a day we are led to expect, and gets very worked up because neither he nor his parents can work out how to help him. It is as if he already feels he might miss something if he allows his eyes to close. Sometimes I really don’t want to hold a screaming baby for another moment, but I can’t leave him to bawl in his cot: he expresses such abject misery that it breaks my heart.

But on the other hand, he gets more personality every day. He makes eye contact, he lifts his head when we put him on his stomach, and he has a few cute gurgling noises which make a wonderful change from the crying. His burpy little smiles are beautiful.

Photo by Pix

This week has been much more relaxed. Several things have contributed to this. The worst is that Pete went back to work on Monday, so now only gets an hour in the morning, another at lunchtime, and a truncated evening with Bernard. We are very much looking forward to the weekend. However this does give some structure to our day, and that has helped us to develop a very vague routine.

In addition, my mum has come to stay. Now, I know I protested loudly that she was only coming down on sufferance, but I have to retract that sentiment with every ounce of my being. She has been wonderful, and I never want her to leave. Her insistence on two sit-down meals a day has further shored up the aforementioned structure, and her advice has been practical and mostly agreeable. On top of all that, she reassures me and boosts my confidence, without ever dismissing my anxieties as silly. And she’s a bloody good cook. Yay for mums, who do after all know best (except for me).

Bernard is starting to take an interest in things other than my breasts. He stares at faces and lights, and seems to be processing information all the time. His pre-smile smiles are starting to form, and he has a beautiful contented expression, which he wears when he’s fed, changed, and being played with. He doesn’t mind being put down in the cot or moses basket for short periods, although he hasn’t yet agreed that it’s okay to go to sleep there. This is still our main project, and all suggestions have been gratefully received and considered. I continue to be ambivalent about the co-sleeping; it’s nice, but I do sleep better when he is in the cot beside the bed. And it gives Pete hallucinations.

We are quite a contented family this week. It’s going well.

I can barely remember the weekend. I think that was when Bernard’s granny came to spend the day stimulating him and depriving him of sleep. She mentioned that asking her to assist with nappy changes was a violation of her human rights, or something.

On Monday morning, he was weighed and found wanting. The midwife refused to discharge him, because he had apparently put on only 10g in 4 days. He is supposed to put on at least 100g a week. Monday was, therefore, a miserable day, spent mostly in bed feeding him up.

On Tuesday we registered the birth, and had him weighed again on a different set of scales. This time he showed a reasonable weight gain, making us wonder if the scales at the clinic were wrong. So that was an up day.

We met our health visitor for the first time on Wednesday. She is lovely, as are most of the professionals we have dealt with since the birth. They all admire Bernard and tell us how beautiful and healthy he looks. We also took him to the breastfeeding clinic at the hospital, where he managed to latch on properly and had a good feed. Unfortunately that evening he produced a series of green nappies, rather than the healthy yellow we had been enjoying until now. Panicked calls to the NCT breastfeeding line. Anxious night.

Back to the baby clinic on Thursday, where the scales showed another decent weight gain. All the empirical evidence is that there is nothing at all wrong with this baby; doesn’t stop us from worrying ourselves sleepless about him. Award for the world’s most neurotic parents definitely goes to us. In addition, he seems to have a cold, which means he wakes up very congested and sounds like he has difficulty breathing.

Yesterday he had another official weighing, and was finally discharged. The midwife also changed his nappy for us, and told us that the green indicates he is in fact overfeeding. The monster. The little menace. But now we’re on to his game, and the new strategy is to relax, to feed him as demanded but not force expressed top-ups into him; and to spend time talking and playing and cuddling, not just fretting over him. The midwife banned us from getting him weighed every other day; she seems to find this an unhealthy fixation.

Now we consider that the feeding thing is cracked, and feel pretty pleased with it. We are also seeing some sort of pattern, at least at night time. We usually get a couple of batches of three hours’ sleep, and if I take him downstairs for at least one of the night feeds, then Pete gets a reasonably good night. In return, he usually minds Bernard at key points during the day, allowing me to nap, take a shower, express some milk, and occasionally check my email.

Our next project is to teach him to sleep in his cot. Currently he falls asleep after feeding, but as soon as he is transferred to the cot, wakes right back up again. We end up co-sleeping, which means he is in the bed with us, and I stay on amber-alert all night listening to him and Pete snoring in stereo. I understand that the cot is cold and not as soft as my arms, and doesn’t smell of mummy (i.e. milky sweat), but I do really want him to sleep there anyway, so that I can switch off too.