Sleeeeeep!

Well I’ve been sadly neglecting my blog lately, haven’t I?! It’s not for a lack of ideas – I have many topics I wish to ramble on about. It’s just that, at the moment, all I can think about is sleep and how I’m Not Getting Enough.

I think of my boy as a good sleeper. He’s nearly always breastfed to a nicely drowsy state and then popped in his cot where he rolls over, chomps on his muslin and promptly falls asleep. Although he has only slept through the whole night 4 times since he was born (all in the same week when I, unfortunately, had the cold from hell so I couldn’t sleep myself) I have noticed that he has very slowly reduced his wakings from three times to a blissful once a night. I can deal with that. Even though I’m going back to work (part-time) in a couple of weeks, I can easily deal with waking once a night for a brief 15min cuddle and feed with my adorable sleepy baby. Trouble is, it only takes the slightest thing to disrupt this natural pattern. The tiniest hint of teething pain, the merest snuffle of a cold, and my sleeping boy is a nightmare to settle and takes to waking at 2 hourly intervals from around 2am. This I cannot deal with. Even without going back to work I can’t take it for long. Thankfully Daddy has the day off today so was able to get up with the boy and give me a much-needed lie in. Hence the almost-coherentness of this post – anything else I’ve tried writing in the past week has been a sad and sorry mess. This last week has been particularly bad as the merest snuffle of a cold swiftly developed into full-blown bronchiolitis, bad enough to warrant a trip to the hospital. The boy is bouncing back rapidly and was back to being his cheeky, cheerful self within 24hrs but, as usual, his sleep pattern is taking much longer to return to what I think of as normal, although when I look back the worrying thought does occur to me that we experience his ‘normal’ pattern much less frequently than his ‘disturbed’ pattern… Well, that’s not a thought to dwell on because if his normal pattern isn’t the good one, we’re getting to the stage where we’ll have to Do Something About It and I have no clue what – that boy is used to having his own sweet way with everything and I’d very much like that to continue for as long as possible.