Bebe

Our baby doesn't sleep

Sorry that I haven't written much lately, but the title might explain why. Our baby has never slept for long stretches, but the situation hasn't really improved over the months and now, when he is 7 months old, we are starting to realize that something really needs to change.

Jordan slept between us in the beginning, but pretty soon we realized that we couldn't sleep in the same bed all three of us. In our soft bed me and baby kept rolling over to where Eerikki was and eventually we all slept in the same hole, all sweaty attached to each other like a big sticky candy :D. That's why we started using the sofa bed in Jordan's room. The one who wasn't on feeding duty slept in the sofa bed and the other one slept in our bed with the baby. Jordan has been receiving milk from a bottle too since the beginning, I have been pumping breast milk for him so that Eerikki can feed him too.

I was worried that I wasn't producing enough milk, so at some point I didn't let Eerikki take night feeding shifts anymore, because I wanted to nurse all the nights. That's when Eerikki slept in the baby's room on the sofa bed and me and the baby slept in our bed. This worked fine for a while. At some point, however, the baby started to be really restless and woke up constantly throughout the night and I started to get tired, even though the breastfeeding hormones make sure that that you tolerate constant waking up pretty well. I then moved him to his own bed to sleep and that went really well with no problems. I just had to wake up and nurse on the edge of my bed and then move him back to his own bed. It didn't work very well for long as he still woke up many times a night and I started to worry that I would drop him when I fell asleep mid-nursing. So we had to start sharing the night shifts again and Eerikki started taking care of parts of the night with pumped milk. We moved Jordan to his own room and soon Eerikki noticed that he slept worse when I was also sleeping in his room and so he then started sleeping alone in his own room, earlier than we had planned.

So, here we are now! It was so great to finally put away the sofa bed about a month ago, and Eerikki and I finally get to sleep every night in the same bed. It's nice that Jordan already sleeps in his own bed and even in his own room, but there are still a lot of night awakenings, and we don't really know what would help.

We have tried different things but nothing has really worked. Sleep school doesn't sound like our thing, so I don't want to do it unless I absolutely have to, and at least not yet. Our health care provider also agreed that at least not before eight months. I know that many have found them helpful and who can say what is right in the end, but letting my baby cry on purpose just doesn't feel right for me.

We share the nights and Eerikki takes a longer portion of them, and if I didn't want to work, this would be a very good system, but because of this, working is almost impossible. Eerikki (who is on parental leave) wakes me up at six in the morning and I possibly still doze off the couple of moments in the morning that the baby sleeps between the moments he wakes up. Then I take care of the baby until about midday, when I wake up Eerikki. In practice, I often don't get to work until 1 pm., and my sleep has often been interrupted even before six. I usually wake up at night when Jordan does despite earplugs. If I don't wake up at nighttime so much, I rarely can fall asleep after six and when I've already taken care of the baby all morning, my best energy is gone by the time I could get to work. So I'm really struggling getting any work done. I know I also have a lot of sleep debt that has accumulated over the last seven months.

If I have any energy, I try to work on my dissertation, so it's hard to find time to blog. Right now there's also not that much to tell… except, this topic, so I decided to write about that :D. I hope that one day soon, I will be able to write and tell you what finally helped. We got a tip from Neuvola about where to get help, so we'll start there and see how the situation progresses. My mother has also kindly promised to start helping even more when she takes a vacation from her part-time job. She promised to take a couple of mornings a week, so I can work in the morning when I'm at my best, and Eerikki can sleep.

Otherwise, we're still doing very well! We agreed at the very beginning that every Monday night is my day off and Thursday night is Eerikki's, so on those nights there are no babysitting responsibilities, but you can do what you want. Of course, you can get more nights off by asking. Our weekly days off don't always happen at least not completely, but we try to stick to them the best we can. My family lives nearby and they are always willing to help if we want to go out for dinner together or otherwise spend a few hours together, so we get to spend some time together just the two of us too, which is great! And the best thing is that Jordan is an absolutely amazing little one and we are so in love with him and family life seems to suit us very well :). Now we just really have to find a way to get him to sleep, first and foremost for his own sake.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

en_USEnglish