Return to Sanity

As many of you are aware, my baby has been breast-feeding at night since she was born in July 2009. This has been manageable until about March, when she went from feeding once at night to feeding between 2-4 times. I did cope for a while but by late April I was shattered. I was going to bed 8.30 or 9 each night and still waking up exhausted after dealing with a grumpy baby in the early hours. I wasa keeping endless sleep logs and spending large amounts of time on baby sleep forums joining similarly deranged parents to discuss and commiserate about our lack of sleep. I gradually realised that she wasn't hungry but was using feeding to get herself back to sleep. The next problem came from my resistance to letting Eden cry it out and not being able to find any other way to teach her to go back to sleep by herself. I tired gradually reducing the amount of milk but that merely enraged her. In the end I found a boom I'd bought ages ago by the Baby Whisperer, which introduced techniques for people not happy to let their child cry themselves abck to sleep. We made up our own version of PUPDCD (pick up, put down, cry down - all sleep techniques must be abbreviated to confusing acronyms!) called GIT ( Go In. Talk) which worked and Eden slept through on the 6th night and has been mostly doing so since. One advantage of breast feeding is that the partner is advised to manage the visits when you are stopping her feeding so Simon got up, went in with her, talked to her (whilst checking his emails) and stayed for 20 minutes and went back in after 10 minutes if she was still crying. After the first night she would stop crying when Simon went in the room, he got to check his emails (something not always easy to manage during the day with a baby around) and Eden would go back to sleep to the sound of daddy's voice. AAahh. Like a good coach, I have drawn out some lessons from this experience. 1. Don't underestimate other people. A 10 month old baby is able to be way more capable than I had expected and she did not cry anywhere near as much as I thought she would when no longer getting fed on demand. 2. Believe that there is a solution. Believe in your own ability to find your own ideas and your own way out of a problem. I read a lot of books and got a lot of help from a forum and in the end, Simon and I found a way to help all of us get more sleep in a way that felt right and safe for Eden. 3. Listen to yourself. Tune in what your instinct is telling you. Mine was saying 'do not let Eden learn to sleep by crying herself to sleep'. It's probably the right thing to do for some people but it wasn't for me (despite the fact that my health visitor said it was 'weak' not to let baby cry it out!). 4. Don't expect bad situations to get better by themsleves. For months I hoped that Eden would suddenly sleep through without my having to do anything or make any decisions. I could have saved us all from sleepless nights earlier had I acknowledged that I had to do something different to make things change. 5.Appreciate what you've got. After months of moaning about sleep, now that I do sleep for 6-8 hours a night, I find myself moaning about how we can't sell our flat. There is always going to be something you can worry about. If you let yourself.