4.20am

It’s 4.20 in the morning. 

We are awake. Not ‘oh the baby needs feeding awake,’ but wide awake, I want to play/learn/develop awake. This is common with our 6-month old.  I don’t know why but his sleeping has got worse rarther then better. What is not common is that it is fast approaching Christmas so we have guests. Our house is quite small for the number of children we have now (we are working on that) so our guests are staying in our living room. The husband still has work tomorrow so I am trying (& failing) to keep the baby form waking him, and away from the toddler bedroom so he dosen’t wake her (she has already woken up twice tonight). 

Normally I would take him downstairs. Watch some crappy tv until he is tired enough to feed back to sleep. I tried feeding back to sleep eirler but it just made my nipples sore and he is still awake. Smiling. 

So, a refugee in my own home. Nowhere to go, cold and tired, sitting on the floor of our bedroom trying to keep a lively infant quiet and watching in the dark for sleepy signals.  I am a fan of Christmas but not a fan of this bit.

It takes two hours to get him to go back to sleep. Meanwhile the husband makes suggestions, which I dismiss because they will disturb him more and the whole point is that I am trying to keep him and The Girl as asleep as possible during this dark hour. The trouble is, by dismissing his ideas I am upsetting the very person I am trying to help in the first place, and that makes no sense. 

The only saving grace is that The Girl has started sleeping in way more then she used to! She wakes up after 8am now, where it used to be more like 6am. Oh she still has the odd early wake, but generally she will wake up after 8 and this gives me the opportunity to catch up a bit.  

We have quite a few visitors over Christmas so this might happen quite a few times. I think now that The Girl is a bit older she is far more entertaining around this time, and able to understand it a bit better, so people are looking forward to her excitement. It rubs off on you a bit-when she gets excited about things. Like when the baby laughs and you spend ages trying to get him to do it again. There is something very satisfying about a baby laugh. Less so the loud grunting/moaning noise he makes when he should be sleeping but isn’t.

Hopefully this will all mean we are looking forward to an exciting Christmas, but how meny of these kind of nights we have remains to be seen. I have given up trying to figure out what is wrong with The Boy, I figure, he’s just a baby, and they wake up in the night. One day he won’t, and I will look forward to that day too!