One small step for a baby…

We interrupt the sleep training news to bring you an important developmental milestone update – Owen walked his first step on his own today! We were at Tina and Freddie’s house and the babies were playing, crawling in and out of the tunnel and clambering over it. We were sitting on the floor with them and all of a sudden Owen stopped playing with something and just stood up on his own! He stood there for quite a while, just looking a bit confused, then grinned at me and stepped towards me before sinking back down to the floor. I had just been saying to Tina a few minutes before that I thought Owen preferred crawling to walking and hadn’t shown any signs of wanting to walk on his own. He cruises around the furniture, and has walked with his walker, but I thought because he is such a fast crawler that maybe he would be a late walker. But now I think not! I’m so proud of him, he’s only 10 months and he’s already starting to walk.

Sleep training continues… he was very lively tonight when I put him in the cot, and he literally was trying to chew his way out, I think. Lucky I got the teething rails! He was bouncing off the cot bars, rolling, sticking his arms and legs through the bars, burying his face in his teddies… I just sat very quiet in the semi-dark and tried not to look at him at all – very difficult when out of the corner of your eye you could swear your baby is doing a handstand.

He finally dropped off at about 8.30, which is later than I would like, and about 20 minutes later than he has been doing which isn’t great. However, he did get up later today. I think we should try to get up earlier tomorrow, but it’s difficult when he’s still asleep – I feel like I really ought to take advantage of the lie in! He has squeaked a couple of times since he went down, once at 9.30 and then again not that long ago, but I haven’t had to go in to him yet… now I’m tempting fate…

Sleep training: Day 9 (I think I’ve lost track!)

Sunday. Today was an odd day for Owen because he stayed at nana’s while I went to Ikea with Kelly and spent a small fortune on strangely named cuddly toys. He fell asleep in the car on the way home, at about half past six, and I knew this might mess him up a bit. Sure enough, he took a lot longer to go down tonight, but he did, eventually, to his credit! I fed him, about four minutes on the breast and then transferred him to bottle.  He was awake when he went into the cot and I gave him his toys. Then I started reading. He was very sleepy at first, and I thought maybe he would go down quickly – but then he seemed to liven up and soon was standing and biting the cot rail. I had actually bought some toothguards but had forgotten to put them on so I had to say ‘no’ and sit him back down. He didn’t like this one little bit, and then did it again – then we had some histrionics. I had to take him out of the cot and give him the rest of the bottle.

He calmed down, so I put him back in the cot, still awake. This time he seemed much more passive and kept putting his head down. I sang ‘Ten Little Monkeys’ and then ‘Ten Green Bottles’ to him, as I wasn’t sure the reading was helping. This seemed to calm him down quite a lot. Finally, he lay down and stayed down. After a couple of minutes I furtively looked at him and he was asleep. I put a blanket over him and left. It had taken about an hour to get him down, from when I first put him in the cot.

Then he woke again, an hour later, with a heart-rending scream, and carried on crying – it was the proper full on crying that you can’t ignore. I went in and tried to soothe him through the cot bars, putting my hand in and stroking him and shushing, but he wouldn’t  be soothed that way. I thought, maybe he had a nightmare, maybe because I’d been away from him all day he had a nightmare that I had not come back. So I took him out of the cot and cuddled him, standing up. He was still frantic so I sat down and continued to cuddle and talk softly. He finally calmed down and drifted back to sleep in my arms. I put him back in the cot and he let out one little angry cry but then went back to sleep immediately.

I know I probably shouldn’t have taken him out of the cot, but I think that in the circumstances, since I had left him with nana all day and he may have had a nightmare, I just wanted to reassure him that mummy is still here and loves him. I am very pleased with myself that I didn’t immediately offer a breastfeed or a bottle, as that was what I would have done a few weeks ago. Self-settling is going to happen, but it’s going to take a little while and I have to do what I feel is right at the time.

Sleep training: Day 5: Back on track

Last night we were back on track with the sleep. I gave him half breast feed, then put him onto the bottle and he took about 4 oz. He was awake but relaxed so I read to him in my bed first, then transferred him, sitting, to the cot. I gave him his two favourite toys and sat down to read. I moved the chair away from the cot after 15 minutes or so and carried on reading. When I could see that he was starting to lie down more, I stopped reading. He fell asleep at 8.10, forty minutes or so from when I put him in the cot.

He then woke at 3.20am, and took a whole bottle (diluted milk, 5oz water to 4 scoops) and still wanted feeding after that so I gave him a breastfeed too. Wondering if this was because it was diluted. I wanted to gradually increase the amount of water to milk powder so that eventually he will take water only, but I’m not sure this is going to work now! I think he’s wise to that game!

Tonight we’ve already had a couple of hiccups. Bedtime was a little chaotic. I don’t really know why but I forgot this, that and the other and I overheated the milk which meant I had to add more cold water, and again he didn’t seem satisfied with the bottle so I had to offer breast. Then he woke up about 1 hour after he went down, which is a little worrying – I just hope it was a minor blip and he now sleeps for a nice long stretch.

Sleep is the main obsession of my life now… from birth to around 3 months it was breastfeeding, when I started weaning it was food (well, it still is to a certain extent) but now all my energy is focussed on getting this sleep thing right. I think the key is slowly, slowly, catchee monkee (please excuse the terrible un-PCness of that phrase!). I have to introduce new things gradually, and be aware that it’s not going to be easy every night, and allow him to also let me know what he’s happy or not happy about. I never realised that sleep could be such a difficult thing for a baby! Mind you, it’s not him that has an issue with sleep, of course. It’s me!

Sleep training: Day 4. One little step back.

I’m cross with myself tonight. Owen didn’t do what I wanted him to do at bedtime, and I got stressed and I took him out of the cot and fed him. Although I didn’t really feed him to sleep because he was awake when he went back down, I did feed him to get him to sleep. And that’s totally not the point of this. I should have taken him out of the cot, calmed him with cuddles and then put him straight back in again. It is so hard though, when you know that a feed will almost certainly calm him down.

He had two good daytime naps today, which maybe meant that he wasn’t very tired. But I think the main problem was that I started expecting too much too soon. I breastfed him after his bath, as usual, but he only took a very short feed and I think maybe I was too quick to take him into his bedroom. Usually I’d read him a bit of a story in my bed before taking him to bed but I thought I’d skip that and just start reading in his room. That was the first mistake I think. Then I was too quick to take his toys out of the cot, because I thought they might be keeping him awake. He started crying when I took one of them, and that was the start of the crying really. I also read with a torch, which fascinated him. The phone rang halfway through, which disrupted the process. Everything kind of went wrong, basically! Bedtime was 8.12pm, forty two minutes from when he first went into the cot. A little step back. But maybe tomorrow we’ll have two little steps forward!

I think this sleep training is training for me as much as for him, it’s about me knowing what makes my baby tick and what makes him tock, what his limits are, what my limits are, what he needs from me in order to get to sleep and how I can help him do it on his own. We’ll get there in the end.

Sleep training: Day 3

Well, it’s going very well. Last night he only took 20 minutes to settle himself to sleep, from fully awake. I put him in his cot, sitting up as on the previous night. He complained very briefly, but then I gave him a musical toy and this kept him occupied. I moved the chair away from the cot so I was starting further away from him. I also put the light on very low from the beginning. I read to him for about 10 minutes, then stopped reading because I could see he was lying down more and read silently to myself for 10 minutes, by which time he had gone to sleep.

He then slept for nine hours! Yes, NINE hours! Straight through! Fiona was staying over, so I was a bit later than normal going to bed (11pm!) but it meant that I also got a good straight six hours sleep, much needed. He woke at five and grizzled, and I thought maybe I could leave him and he would self settle again but eventually I went and got him and gave him a breast feed, then kept him in my bed for the last 2 hours of the night. He fidgeted like crazy, then fell asleep sort of wrapped around my head like a cat! He is a funny little sausage!

To recap, went down at 7.40 awake, took 20 minutes to self settle with me in the room and slept 9 hours without waking.

Tonight he’s scuppered my plans by falling asleep on the boob again! Grr… oh well, I will just have to see how it goes in the night, won’t I? I do hope he has a good night, I felt so energised this morning after a fantastic night’s sleep. Haven’t felt that good for aaaaaaages!

Self settled! No crying!

This is going to be the start of a new sleep regime! I have decided that from now on, I am not going to feed Owen to sleep in the night, he will have to start learning to self-settle. And this evening has been a success!

Yesterday we were still at mums, and I was going out to a toy party. So of course, Owen decides to choose  that night to not go to sleep on the breast, he woke up as I was putting him into the cot and screamed blue murder. So I took him out again and gave him some more breast, but he didn’t really want it and again he did not want to go into the cot. Eventually mum came in and tried to cuddle him to sleep (he won’t let me cuddle him to sleep, he always expects a feed). That didn’t work so I went back in and said lets try putting him in his cot sitting up and see what happens. So I put him in, and he was a bit whiny, but then started playing with a toy. I eventually left mum with him so I could go out, and phoned about an hour later, and she said that he had finally gone to sleep, she had gradually withdrawn herself away from the cot and out of the door. He stood up and watched her go, but didn’t cry. She could hear him playing with his toys on the monitor for a while and finally he went off to sleep.

So tonight. We are back at the flat, and I kind of knew that he would be difficult. He’s been a bit whingey since we got back – I think he found it a bit weird, and maybe missed having mum there. So I did everything as normal: tea at 5pm, TV at 6pm, bath at 6.45, feed at 7pm. He didn’t go to sleep on the breast, as I suspected he wouldn’t, so I read him a bit of The Reptile Room, and then took him into his room and put him in the cot. He didn’t like it, and started to cry, but I then seated myself in the chair next to the cot and started reading the book aloud to him, quietly. He seemed to be quite delighted at this turn of events, and started playing.

I found it actually quite relaxing, although he was virtually trying to climb out of the cot at one point, and reaching out his arms to me! He was perfectly happy, though. He kept moving for ages, standing up, sitting down, lying down, rolling over, talking to himself, talking to me, biting the cot rail, scratching the wall. But after a while it was obvious that he was sitting more than standing. I stopped reading and moved my chair nearer to the door. Then I just read to myself. I saw him perk himself up and look over at me, and he squeaked in semi-alarm… but once he had reassured himself that I was still there and not going anywhere, he lay back down again.

Another ten minutes or so and he was lying more than sitting. He crawled around and changing position about a squillion times, and huffed and puffed, and once he sat bolt upright and stared straight over at me as if he had been trying to catch me out! But he lay down again, and finally I just sensed that he had drifted off. I quietly stood up, gently put a blanket over him and left the room.

This is a breakthrough! I feel so elated that he actually went off to sleep without me having to feed him into a stupor. I know that this is going to take a while, but I mean to carry it on. The plan now is to gradually move myself further and further away from him when I have put him in the cot, so that finally I will be able to put him in, read him a little story and then leave. Also, to separate the last feed from bedtime a bit more.

So, to recap, tonight he fed (bf) for about 15 minutes, went into cot awake, and took about 50 minutes to settle himself to sleep with me in the room withdrawing to near the door after 20 minutes. No crying. Lovely

Time to write… or not.

Have had a bit of an odd few days. I’m staying at mums this week, not because I’m ill because actually I’m feeling much better and have been for over a week now. Just because John is away this week, it’s nice for me to have mum to help out and it’s nice for mum to have lots of contact with Owen.

However, Owen has been very unsettled. I even debated going  back home this morning, after a couple of very restless nights and a few bad nappies. But it’s hard to tell if it’s the change in environment, or teething, or an upset tummy, or something completely different. Or a combination. He is coming over here on Friday anyway to sleep over, so I am reluctant to take him home for two nights, then bring him back. That’s even more disruptive to his routine. Anyway, his routine hasn’t really changed, so it can’t be that really. My poor little man. He’s having a nice long nap at the moment. I had to breast feed him to sleep, as he was really losing the plot earlier, and refused a bottle.

I was hoping to get the time to start work again on my book. But I haven’t, and don’t see it happening really. I started writing it years ago, after my second miscarriage, and it wrote itself for a while, and then it kind of ran away with itself and finally it got itself all tangled up in knots and stopped writing itself. And since then I’ve struggled to get it going again. Basically, the dragon escaped too early, and the wrong person helped him escape, and then I couldn’t seem to put him back in prison. Now I want to make some fairly drastic plot revisions, and rewrite huge chunks of it so that it’s more of a kid’s book and less a fantasy book. I think this is going to take some big chunks of time, not just an hour here and there. I need to have a good few hours at a time really.

Oh well. For now I guess the only writing I will be doing is this blog, and I even struggle to find time for that at the moment!

We sat at Checkpoint Charlie, drunk, stupid capitalists.

Today is the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Twenty years ago today I was sitting on the wall at Checkpoint Charlie. I was drunk on vodka and the whole crazy, weird, madness of the situation. How ironic for us, middle class Interior Design students from Middlesex University in England, to be some of the first people to witness this historic event – to have front row seats if you like in this one time only show. The greatest show I ever went to, in fact. I was too young and stupid to even know or care about the implications of what I was witnessing. Everyone kept harping on about it being an historic event, and we knew this, but I don’t think it sunk in till much later what sort of scale of event we were fortunate enough to be observers at. We thought of ourselves as socialists, lefties, politically aware – but of course we weren’t. We were about as politically unaware as it is possible to be. We mouthed left-wing sentiments but harboured very capitalist, conventional desires and aspirations. We had no idea what it meant to live in a Communist state, and how could we? We were constantly complaining about Margaret Thatcher and wanted a revolution, but if one had arrived we would not have been the first out of bed in the morning to go and fight any battles.

We had even been through to East Berlin that very day. It was cold but sunny I think, and we were anxious to experience as much of the ‘East’ as we could. We laughed at the rows of Trabants and gaped at the grey blandness of the tower blocks, we tried to eat food in a ‘workers cafe’ and found it unpalatable in the extreme, especially when out of the vegetable soup that some of the vegetarians in our group ordered came rising ominous pink lumps of identifiable animal matter. We ascended the Fernsehturm and looked out across the divided city, we went to an art museum and I don’t remember what we saw there, and we tried to buy things in a supermarket but they had nothing to sell that would have been any use as a keepsake, in fact there was barely anything on the shelves at all. I did manage to buy an album in a music shop – strangely, a Richard Strauss opera, Salome, which I don’t think I ever listened to.

At about six o’clock we walked back to Checkpoint Charlie. It was dark, and we had to negotiate a few poorly lit back streets to find the border. I think we may have got lost at one point – the border to the West is not signposted well. There were a few large groups of people hanging around. They were acting a little oddly, they were huddled quietly, not being loud or aggressive or anything. We barely paid them any attention at the time, only later realised the significance.

We finally found the border and Checkpoint Charlie and popped back into the West with a sigh of relief. We went to a restaurant with neon lights and fat candles on the tables, and ate Western food, drank Western alcohol and got Westernly merry. We went back to the hotel, a couple of kilometres from the wall and sat in the hotel bar, and drank more and got drunker. The Germans in the bar were watching the tiny TV hanging over the bar. We were quite drunk by around ten o’clock and noticed that there was a huge crowd of very excited people around the TV. Someone went over and asked what was happening. They came back over. The Germans are excited because East Germany has opened the border. They are letting people through to the West.

How long did it take us for the information to sink in? Our addled brains finally did realise that this was ‘an historic event’ and then there was only one option. We had to get back to the wall. We started walking, and headed for a tube station. But the tubes were packed, and it looked a hopeless task. So we walked. Very fast. We made it, finally. The crowds were big, but not huge. The news had not yet reached everyone. There weren’t even that many TV crews there – in fact I don’t remember seeing a single TV crew. We pressed through the throng to the wall, and there people were already sitting crammed like a row of excited seagulls. A blond German guy hauled me up and I managed to get a prime position. Over in Nomans Land there was a row of green clad soldiers, all linked arms, pale as ghosts. They didn’t move a muscle, but they looked confused. Just a few hours ago their orders would have been to shoot anyone doing what we were doing now!

Vodka was passed down the line of people on the wall. At Checkpoint Charlie the wall was very narrow, not like at the Brandenburg Gate where several people could stand across the width. I was trying to take photographs, but was jostled and dropped my camera into Nomans Land. The guard closest to me looked straight at me and I asked him to give me my camera back. He didn’t do anything for a few seconds, then he bent down, picked my camera up and handed it back to me. Not a word. I drunkenly expressed my thanks but he didn’t smile or speak at all. He was very young and good looking. I only took a few pictures that night, and of them only one came out and neither I nor the wall are in it.

We went to a bar later and found ourselves talking to a very young guy who had come over. He was very excited about his first purchase in the West, a Beastie Boys album (well, tape) and a Walkman. He didn’t speak very good English, but he kept saying, ‘Margaret Thatcher, she great person, she hero..’ or something along those lines. Luckily we didn’t know enough German to be able to tell him that we didn’t share his opinion of the Iron Lady. But it was my first realisation that somewhere along the line, my ideals were a little contradictory. How did my socialism stand up to scrutiny? And why was I celebrating the downfall of communism, when I considered myself just a little communist…? And was Maggie a hero, after all? I just didn’t know any more.

We returned to Checkpoint Charlie in the morning and the cavalcade of people were still coming through. TV crews had now cottoned on and had set up right by the gates and were sticking their big microphones into every car that came through. We went into the Museum Am Checkpoint Charlie and climbed out of a window on the third floor to watch from on the scaffolding that covered the front of the building. The atmosphere was still electric. We didn’t seem to have hangovers. At one point I watched, fascinated, as a little old lady staggered back towards the border, carrying two plastic bags stuffed full of nothing but bananas. She kept having to put them down. When she saw me, she picked them up and shook them excitedly, but almost defiantly. ‘Banana!’ she shouted at me, happily. I nodded, grinning inanely. Banana. Yes. I still hold that image in my head. Fresh fruit was going to become quite a big issue in the newly unifed Germany, but at the time it was just a little old lady, happy that she could now buy bananas.

Well, I will stop reminiscing there. It seems a lifetime ago, almost another universe. I was starting out in life, and I believed that anything was possible. The me that was me then was a different person, with different views, opinions, desires, loves, anxieties. Even different cells. It is so strange to think that I sat on Checkpoint Charlie, and watched one of the biggest historical events of modern history unfold.

Owen is very well, by the way, and sleeping peacefully.

He makes my life complete in a way nothing and no one else has ever done or will do.

Slow parenting versus group mania

Beautiful day today. Walked down to the seafront this morning, at around 9.3o am and the sea was wild. It was one of those amazingly clear, crisp autumn days, the sun was so bright it almost blinded you bouncing off the sea and the waves just pounded the shore. You could almost feel the raw energy passing right into you. After so many days and weeks of malingering, I felt energised to the point of mania. I wanted to bound around on the rocks and scream at the sea! I wanted to dive in on the crest of a wave, and be thrown about at the mercy of the tides. Owen loved it too! We sat on the sea wall and just soaked it all up, my little man’s face was a beaming picture of happiness. I can’t remember the last time I felt that good. It was an almost religious moment. I knew then that the most important, beautiful moments aren’t planned, aren’t paid for, aren’t  written in the diary. I want to do it every morning, but I know that it wouldn’t be the same.

Later today, I read an online article about something called the Continuum Concept, which promotes ’slow parenting’ – as opposed to competitive parenting whereby the child is dragged to baby swimming at 4 weeks (guilty as charged) and basically bribed, blackmailed, cajoled and chivvied into growing up just as fast as he or she can. For a while now I have felt that these groups are less than useful. I stopped the baby swimming, since Owen didn’t really seem to be enjoying it. The music group was a waste of time – and is it really going to hamper his musical development if he doesn’t sit in a circle being sung stupid songs at six months?! I don’t think so. He hated it anyway – whereas he absolutely LOVES me playing guitar to him! It a no-brainer. The only group I do now is baby signing, and even that is starting to seem pointless. Owen and I are building up our own little shared language, and the Sing and Sign group is not particuarly useful. Owen gets bored in it too. So I think I’m going to be investigating the Continuum Concept, and slow parenting, a bit more now! I think the best time is the time we get together when Owen can crawl and cruise around freely, and I sit with him as he plays. He gets really excited when I lie down on the floor, he’ll come charging over and give me a big hug, and probaby a bite too, and then crawl over me or something – but it’s really lovely to see his little face light up – Mummy is coming to join me!! I have to do it much more often. It’s worth it just for that little happy welcoming squeal!