Update

HELP!

Phew, it's been quite a difficult month here, actually, for almost two months already. Fortunately, these six weeks have also included a lot of wonderful moments and days, but when it's been hard, it's been really hard.

Everything stems from the fact that our baby has never slept well at night. Eerikki and I share the nights, but since the sounds can be heard through the earplugs, neither of us can sleep well. So we both have at least a year's worth of sleep debt.

I feel like this constant vigil became extra taxing after the nights finally started to improve. Suddenly, the baby woke up maybe just once every night, sometimes he even slept through the whole night. This started maybe two months ago when Jordan was 10 months. That's when we both thought hey, we made it! The mornings started really early, like at five o'clock, but still, from 8 pm to 5 am waking up maybe once was amazing compared to before where the norm was six wake-ups a night.

Then a little bit of everything hit us. Jordan had a runny nose and he had a cough that wouldn't go away and it was clearly starting to annoy him too. Around the same time, he also started teething again. It feels like Jordan has been teething almost non-stop since he was three months old and it's always been painful. He started waking up again several times a night and yet the mornings still started at five, even four. I thought this would pass soon and then he would sleep again, but it just kept going on like this and he was constantly cranky. Needless to say, it started to be really tiring, just when we thought it would finally get easier, he started waking up again throughout the night, then we had to get up at five in the morning, and he was often in a bad mood. I think the poor thing was tired too and that made him cranky.

Then on top of everything else, we had an accident two weeks ago. Jordan was practicing climbing the stairs in Albert's living room and when he got down the stairs, a parent had just come in with their child. I tried to make sure that Jordan didn't run into the little guy and steered him to the side. I guess due to my mingling, Jordan lost his balance and hit his head on the bottom step. The irony here is that I'm not the hovering kind of parent at all. I don't know how you can learn to walk or understand how the laws of physics work if you aren't allowed to fall down and practice through bumps and mistakes. However, it is quite different if Jordan is tired or his coordination is affected for some other reason, or there is some other reason to be careful, such as dangerous corners or stairs. So as he was on stairs, I was literally holding on to him and that was the time he had a bad fall. Maybe my actions didn't really matter, but I couldn't help but go through what happened dozens of times in my head and wonder if it had been my fault. I have also wondered that since I am so incredibly tired, maybe my reflexes were too slow and if I had slept better I would have caught him in time. Fortunately it was enough to glue the wound, he didn't need stitches and everyone has assured me that these things happen, but still I was a bit traumatized by what had happened. Jordan definitely didn't get traumatized, he giggled all happily as I nursed him ten minutes after the incident. For whatever reason Jordan fell, it left me feeling really crappy and the timing was terrible too as Eerikki was on a business trip at the time.

Eerikki and I usually have a good team spirit, but we've had a few big arguments now and it's taken us a while to calm down and realize that our problem is with exhaustion not with each other. It's pretty surprising that we don't really take our frustration out on Jordan, even if it's a really difficult day, we understand that Jordan isn't feeling well and he's not trying to be difficult.

I quit nursing a couple of days after Jordan's 1st birthday. I had always planned to breastfeed for a year and I felt like I wasn't producing that much milk anymore, probably due to tiredness, so the timing came naturally. Right now we've also decided to allow anything, that would help us sleep. We're in the US for Christmas and the baby's sleep schedule and habits will change there, so we're taking advantage of that by trying different things now. We take Jordan to our bed at some point of the night and he gets as much milk (now from a bottle) as he wants during the night. This way, he sleeps until eight o'clock, even nine, with just a few wake-ups during the night. That's one great thing about this month, I get to sleep with both, Jordan and Eerikki, next to me. We moved Jordan to his own bed when I couldn't sleep next to him anymore when he was a baby as he was waking up all the time. I was worried that the nights would never get better if we took him to our bed again and so we haven't since... until now, at the moment of desperation 😅. But I love having this sleepy little cutie next to me every night and although I know that due to it affecting the quality of my sleep it can't be continued for long, these few weeks have been so nice and I enjoy every night in our family bed.

So in the end, don't worry, we're ok. We celebrated Jordan's birthday last Sunday and the preparations took a lot of time and energy so now that the party's behind us, we're not so busy anymore and all we have to do is wait for our vacation. Although these last two months have definitely been the most difficult ones of the baby year, they have also contained a lot of good things. We had an amazing trip to Saimaa with my relatives, there were 19 of us on the trip and it was really fun! Then I had an absolutely perfect birthday a couple of weeks ago. In addition to that, there have been many other lovely days, and the best thing about being overtired is that the most simple and stupid things can make you laugh out loud uncontrollably, so when it's been fun, it's been really fun :D.

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