Monday 8 August 2011

Sleep is for the weak...or the lucky.


   



Even if you don’t have kids, you know that sleepless nights come with the territory. What you don’t know is how frustrating they can be.
Since BB was born he has been fed straight from the breast. This is something that both I and Christine feel strongly about.
The problem with that of course is that I am unable to feed the little man. Which means Christine has to wake every 2-3 hours to feed BB and I can do nothing but try and sleep through it, or help her in any way I can. (Dean over at DaddyNatal did an awesome post about us fellas and breastfeeding. Check it out HERE.)

Unfortunately if you believe Breast is best this is something you just have to deal with until you feel you need to go onto bottles. The advice seems to be, to only go onto bottles when you can no longer deal with the rigours of feeding from the breast, because BB will find it easier from a bottle and won’t put the effort in when it’s time to drink from the source.

Christine, as with everything has been amazing. She wakes up, feeds the boy when he wants it and happily goes back to sleep. The problem lately is that BB doesn’t do the same. We don’t know whether it’s the Moses basket he doesn’t like or not but he just won’t settle.

We only seem to have had 1 really bad one night where he woke around 1am to feed and didn’t settle back don until about 3am, all the time keeping Christine awake. That was until tonight!

Now don’t get me wrong, I understand that he won’t just simply flick a switch and go back to sleep, but the frustrating thing is he doesn’t cry as if he is unhappy. He just makes a lot of other noises, stretches and kicks out a lot. After consulting my Encyclopaedia of everything (Google) it’s pretty clear that this is common amongst newborns.

So tonight, he is kicking off big style and if Christine has to be awake so often, she also needs to get some sleep. So I have brought the little man downstairs so his mamma can get some un-broken sleep and he seems to settle in his little swing chair really well. Can it harm him in anyway him sleeping in a swing chair as opposed to a bed?

So, BB is fast asleep in his swing chair, the mummy is asleep in her bed and daddy is sat flicking through the channels, trying to find something to watch.

Anywhoo, its 4:30am and I am probably, nope definitely rambling on and I think I can smell my son is awake...goody!

Night night, sleep well...those of us that can anyway!


2 comments:

  1. Firstly, thanks for your comments.
    Like I said in the above post, the hospital have lead us to believe that bottle feeding occasionally can affect how well the little man feeds from the breast.
    Do you think thats true?

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  2. Sounds to me like you're both doing a great job. The Munchkin is just starting to sleep longer at night now which means the mrs can think about getting some sleep (except she doesn't, she just wanders off and does housework or, like last night, paints a watercolour).
    Munchkin grew out of her moses basket in a matter of weeks and putting her into a cot helped her sleep.

    As for the breastfeeding .. problems aside, Mrs Neil has been expressing a feeds worth so I can feed munchkin at least once a day - normally in the morning when Mrs is asleep.

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