Our day… 9.5months: Monday

another month has flown by since my last “our day: 8.5months: Saturday” was posted and I wanted to share how another day in our life looks like.

02h47 Monkey has decided that since she can stand, this would be the perfect opportunity to do this and stare at us while we are sleeping. As we are not providing sufficient entertainment (i.e or maybe I am snoring too much) – she vocalized her disdain until one of us gets up. This time, HIM goes over to her crib, tries to settle her down with her pacifier and walk away, but Monkey isn’t buying this… surely there is more to do?? Eventually, he takes her to the bathroom (with a soft light) to change her nappy and give her a bottle. Within minutes of lowering her back into the crib she nods off to sleep again.

04h30 “Hello World – is it morning yet?” Her movements and noises mean that I get up with her and we waddle to the spare room where I wrap my arms around in on the spare bed, shush-ing her in the hopes that she might doze off to sleep again. Instead she finds the game of pushing her fingers into my eye socket or yanking on a piece of hair to be more entertaining…. I attempt to fake sleep in the hopes that it might encourage her to close her eyes as well.

06h50 I wake up before her… this is amazing! One of our LATE morning starts! I have no idea how long it took, but she eventually dozed off to sleep again. I lie next to her and gaze up on her angelic sleeping face with long luscious eyelashes. Within minutes, her spider sense must have kicked in, because she opens her eyes and gives me a HUGE grin and scrambles to get to the headboard – her favourite morning activity is to pull herself into standing position and stare down at me with glee, as if to say “Loook mom, I can stand!!!”

07h10 I rush through the shower, while she sits in the laundry basket playing with an empty plastic bottle and a tube of stretch mark cream. It gives me just enough time to brush my teeth, shower & wash my hair. I dress quickly while she attempts to escape the basket. A quick nappy change and I put her some crèche appropriate clothes (layers as the day promises to be warm!)

07h20 As soon as I place her in the highchair and pull out her cereal, bowl & spoon, she gets excited and upset – all at the same time. Demanding to be fed! Her little mouth like a baby birds waiting for that first mouthful. She manages 90% of her bowl of cereal before refusing to open her lips and tossing her head from side to side – her signal for *no more*. A quick clean up (of her face), pack bags (for her & for my work day) and I pop her into the carrier.

07h40 We walked to crèche where I handed her over to the owner. Today was the first time that she did a really GOOD (aka BAD) cry when I handed her over. I rush out of there before her tears upset me further

08h00 work….

17h00 switch off computer and head home

17h15 And I am home to find Monkey and HIM on the couch playing (more like Monkey using HIM as a climbing frame… but indeed… playing). The 3 of us spent the next 45minutes helping Monkey explore the stairs (which she has a huge fascination with now that she knows how to climb them), crawl over us and between the kitchen & lounge area, pull all the toys out of a bowl (one by one) and general pull/play with the coffee table (as standing is something that she is so overjoyed about being able to do – she can spend a good portion of time pulling herself up on the coffee table and take a step or bang the top with a plastic spatula)

18h00 dinner time for Monkey! I forgot to take one of her meals out of the freezer in the morning – so instead, she gets a baby food sachet (pear, cereal & raspberries) along with a yoghurt – she gobbles up both

18h20 More play time…

18h45 Bath time – HIM is off on a Monday night, so he takes over and spends this time with her while I pop in a load of laundry, prep her pre-bed bottle and do a quick tidy up. Once she is clean & dressed in some Pj’s – I pop her into the sleeping bag and see if she wants some milk. Not interested. So we attempt our first night of sleep training (more on this in another blog)

19h40 Once she is asleep, I tip-toe downstairs to start dinner for HIM & myself (oven roasted potato wedges, gammon steak with a pea/mint puree and a chopped salad)

22h15 After dinner and watching a movie together – it is time for this mama to head to bed as well.

~23h00 and 24h00  – Monkey coughs herself awake, giving little meowing moans – so I get out of bed to stroke her back and give her back her pacifier – she is essentially still asleep – so this is a quick action…

01h00 – I wake up to find Monkey standing up her crib, bouncing up and down and making a fair amount of noise. I try to re-install the sleep method – but after 10minutes of sitting on a chair next to her crib while she is determined it is playtime, HIM suggests giving her a bottle, which she greedily devours and goes back to sleep without an issue…

04h20 – and awake again… Monkey and I move to the spare room and the cycle begins again 🙂

 

Sleep training… part 1

I got all excited when Monkey, at 8months, slept through the night… so excited that I patted HIM and myself on the back, wrote a post about it and thought that was the end of sleep training.

BIG MISTAKE!

Essentially – we had been blessed until she was 8months old. Joking that she actually put “herself” to bed each night. We had never needed to rock or soothe her, just put her in her sleeping bag into the crib after her bath & bottle and walk out of the room – that was that! She didn’t even need to be asleep. She would lie there, stare at the mobile, the wall, the bars on the crib – sometimes gurgling/talking to herself or her hand and eventually doze off to sleep.

Ha… then she slept through… double Ha… and I thought we were conquering parenthood with one hand tied behind our backs…. Ha ha ha ha…

The real kicker was that she started to teeth around the same time – which meant that sleep regression was in full force. Going to sleep wasn’t the issue, I could still put her in her crib and walk out the room and she would go to sleep, but suddenly she was waking up almost every hour and crying. So I took her in my arms, rocked her and sometimes even held her on my chest in bed while she whimpered and moaned and eventually fell asleep. I thought it was all ok while she was teething.. she needed comfort and love – not CIA (Cry it Out)… right?

Well – the bottom teeth popped out – 3 weeks apart… But essentially a decent nights sleep for any of us was out of the equation.

The next hurdle was the fact that around the same time (8.5months), Monkey learned to sit up by herself, crawl and pull herself into standing position all in the same week… which meant that the moment she was put into her crib to sleep, she would pull herself up to stand and any ideas of sleep were long gone from her mind – she wanted to jump and climb and play! And if either HIM or I walked out the door (like we used to), she would start sobbing uncontrollably. Snot, tears and saliva running all over her face.

I tried the CIA method… everything from returning to the room at 3/5/10minute intervals, trying to get her to lie down, put my hand on her chest while she wriggled and wiggled to get out from under it, bucking and thrashing and crying out because she was pinned to the bed. This could go on for ages (one particular night lasted 1hr20min), until I would pick her up, put her on our bed next to me and then within 5minutes, the monkey was asleep.

What were we doing wrong? (And trust me, I am sure that there are a million things we were doing wrong.) We moved bedtime later. I tried sitting in the room with her but ignoring her (this was really difficult as she would be trying to make eye contact and get my attention)… We persevered with CIA. I even tried just putting her in the bed with me after her bath and bottle, just so that we could have a “quick” fall asleep pattern. Nothing was working and nothing was right…

So, Tonight we try a new method that I found online at Incredible Infant… supposedly the Sandman’s guide to sleeping through. Hold fingers for all of us….

Have you also tried sleep training? How did it go? Any recommendations?