So I’ve been so happy to tell everyone that I’m the luckiest mommy alive. My baby sleeps through the night! My baby doesn’t care if he has formula or breast milk. He’ll switch from breast to bottle without a blink. He gives me kisses. He likes to eat food. He stopped peeing when the diaper comes off.
My luck ran out over the holidays. I woke up sick on Christmas morning and it’s been one thing after another since then. I was on two antibiotics for eye and ear infections. WTF? It was so gross. And I was exhausted. Limbs feeling weak, nodding off at the desk exhausted.
W started running a fever on New Year’s eve and completely stopped sleeping through the night. I know lots of parents are laughing at me. Finally!!! Hahaha! See what we all deal with?? But I’m siiiiiiiick. Uuuuuuuuggggghhhh. Waking up every 45 minutes every night was killing me. M and I generally try to alternate picking up W when he cries. That wasn’t working. M just doesn’t have the mommy touch. W would fall back to sleep, but then he’d wake up 2 minutes later (usually while M is in the bathroom), so I have to go in there anyway. We tried a few nights of winging it. We’d look at each other at the first cries and hope he’d go back to sleep. That meant he just escalated to wails and screams by the time one of us was in there. So the rocking would be 10-20 minutes at a time. Then we would give up and bring him into bed with us. That wasn’t working. Then we tried the no cry sleep solution. We would go in the second we heard the whimpering and pick him up and generally we could put him back down in a few minutes. We also set a cut off time – if (when!) he cried after 3 am, he just came to bed with us. So we got at least a few hours of light sleep. That worked well the first night. Then he started getting stuffed up and just could not sleep unless he was kind of sitting up. So after lots of tears, we went to the guest bedroom with lots of pillows and we both tried to sleep there. M and I alternated days for this. M tried to take more than every other night and would tell me, “Tonight I will take care of W. I’m not tired.” Then he would roll over and push me out of bed at the first cries. I was not mad at him, it was kind of funny. He has no recollection of the pushing.
At one point, I took W to the doctor to rule out any ear infections for him, but he was perfectly fine. I love my pediatrician even more because he took me seriously when I said that my reason for coming in was that W was just not himself.
So that was my life for 2 weeks. Bad sleep, stuffy baby, sick mommy, yuckiness. We started putting some cereal in his bottle at night and we set up a vaporizer and we are squirting saline in his nose (by the way – bad mommy moment – the face he makes when I spray it is hysterical). Something in this combination is working. We’ve had 2 nights of bliss. He’s been waking up, but he wiggles his way up so his head is pressed up against the crib and his butt is in the air and he goes back to sleep. He’s a little piece of heaven. We’re happy again!
I was getting pretty upset during that no sleep time. I would just sit there and rock him and he’d be crying and trying to sit up when all I want him to do is sleep. I was almost in tears from frustration, but then I would stop. I thought to myself about all the times I cried because I didn’t think I would have nights like that. It was strange, and calming, to sit in the middle of the night with a screaming baby and think about how thankful I am. Because that’s what matters the most. Not sleep, I’d trade sleep for him any time.
So back to the cereal in the bottle thing – W is breastfeeding less and less. He used to go to bed around 8 or 8:30 and I’d do a little dreamfeed around 10 when I went to bed. This got all confused when I was sick. I was going to bed right after W went down and when he woke up around 12 or whatever I would try to feed him. Sometimes he didn’t want anything. Sometimes that seemed to make things worse. So I started giving him a bottle right at bed time with a small amount of cereal. That is keeping him asleep and he isn’t even really demanding food right when he wakes up at 6:30. So the night nursing is gone. I’m left with just once per day, first thing in the morning. I’m going to keep it up until next week. He’ll be 8 months on the 19th… I’ll give him a birthday bottle that morning.
How do I feel about this? Not like I thought I would. I’m sad. But not upset sad, we’re weaning on my terms and I’m completely comfortable with it. I want to stop. I want to take strong cold medicines and drink lots of wine. But I’m going to miss it. I’m going to miss the little face he makes when I put him on the boppy (um, he might think Milk comes out of the boppy) and the rooting. I’ll miss his little hands scratching me. I’ll miss the face he makes when I start talking while he’s eating. He pulls off and pushes himself off and gives me a LOOK. Like, lady, I’m trying to eat here. Can you please have your conversations at another time? Really?
The formula feeding stuff is awesome and convenient and easy. Washing the bottles kind of blows, but I had to do that anyway with daycare and pumping. It’s actually less now! W can hold his own bottle so we can feed him while we have dinner or do chores. That means more time for playing. He’s eating all kinds of pureed food. We’re going to start meats soon. He is –just- getting the hang of putting a puff in his mouth to eat it. I’m hoping he’ll start eating little pieces of banana soon. I want to feed him more finger food, but the lack of teeth is making me sad. I’ll be pureeing PBJ sandwiches when he goes to kindergarten.
