My Boy Doesn't Sleep! – by Lorraine, mum of Joseph
Sleep… the holy grail of new parenthood. A quick search of the internet using the terms ‘sleep’ and ‘baby’ produces over 13 million hits! My husband and myself have never been great sleepers (I once flew to Australia from London, via Bahrain and Singapore, and didn’t sleep a wink until arriving at my hotel in Sydney) but somewhat counter-intuitively, we expected that our baby would be a fab sleeper. Of course he wasn’t! For a few weeks, virtually no one believed me when I said that our wondrous little Joseph slept for a total of six hours out of every twenty four, and in bursts of no more than ninety minutes. Now he is nine months old and he still does not sleep particularly well. Last night was typical: he fell asleep about nine o’clock and gave up at about quarter past two. He dozed on and off between three and six and it is now 10am and he is happily gurgling away, playing with the telly remote.
If, before my boy was born, someone had told me how little sleep I would be getting, I would have flown off into a wild panic. Yet I reckon I have only had three or four really bad days where I have felt shockingly tired. The truth is that our brains and bodies are hard-wired to cope. The human body is an amazing thing and can adapt to the most intense and stressful situations. Most babies do not sleep well and most mums and dads can cope with it. The hardest thing to put up with, in my view, is the questions and expectations of other people. If I had a quid for every bit of advice I have ever been offered (from letting him cry it out to giving him nips of gin) I would be able to fly to Hawaii (and back) first class. Given that the majority of babies do not sleep soundly through the night until they are well over a year old, the false expectations of others can be extremely annoying!
I’m sure I’m not kidding myself when I say that when Joseph finally does sleep through the night in his own room I will miss our times together. I feel so close to him when all is dark and quiet and I can hear his sweet feeding noises and feel his little warm hands on me. I won’t miss random advice from other folk though!