Who needs an alarm clock? Not me, baby…
I'd have to say that Babybear is an excellent sleeper (although she is currently playing with her baby gym beside me and it's nearly 1am sowhat'sallthatabout?) but her parents are a couple of disorganised layabouts who like to stay up late and get up later. So we obviously knew from the minute I peed on the stick that we weren't going to be following any strict childcare regime. (Well, that and the fact that the likes of Gina Ford's routine is SO badly written that it makes your skin itch. Say what you like about letting babies cry it out – and I'd prefer you say that it's unnecessarily cruel – but, my GOD that woman's writing gave me the heebie-jeebies.)
So when she was first born, we consciously decided not to stress about Babybear's sleeping habits, so once we got throught the first six weeks of constant night-time breastfeeding, we all used to go to bed as a family at about 12midnight and watched DVDs while I breastfed and the bub dropped off at about 1am. She would then generally sleep 'til 9 or 10am, the good little sausage. (Actually, these were pretty much the hours I kept while pregnant, which I don't think can be a coincidence).
It was the baby herself who dialled that back to 11pm, then 9pm then 7.30pm and more recently since weaning her we've noticed that she needs to go to bed at 6.30pm if we want to avoid that hellish 'over-tired' thing. (That bloody Vauxhall advert has so re-programmed the Husband's puny brain that he cannot pronounce it any other way than 'ooooveh-tiad' so for that reason alone I find it's best to get the baby down before she gets to that stage. )
I'm not sure if it got worse because of weaning, teething, or learning to crawl so that she is now more fatigued, but we did have a bad spell quite recently where she was just roaring with pain and exhaustion for a couple of hours at night – bearing in mind we have been so spoilt we thought our world was coming to an end – and it took us a while and a few frantic 'help me oh dear god help me' posts on Mumsnet before we got to the bottom of it and decided that we were feeding her solids too close to her last milk feed. See, you knew this would come back to baby led weaning eventually, you just had to stick with me…
So for interest I can tell you that I tend to treat her milk feeds and solids as something quite different to her solids, and insofar as we have a schedule it goes a little seomthing like this:
She normally wakes up at 7.52am – you think I'm kidding? – has a bottle at about 8-ish, then solids
(cheese, porridge pancakes, peaches) at 9-ish then a bath or a wipe-up and another
bottle before another nap from about 10 or 11 till 12-ish or 1-ish…
Then some snacks (rice cakes, a banana, Organix moon biscuits and her water) as we
are out and about and probably another bottle after an afternoon nap in
the buggy, then if we are at home she has some solids (fruit, pasta,
whatever is around) at 4 ish and then her last bottle at 6-ish.
It's all very -ish, isn't it? But basically all I am saying is that if I want her to drink her bottles
properly I know I have to leave a good couple of hours without snacks. And even at that her daytime bottles are often left half-empty… which I have just had to chill right out about because as you know, baby led weaning is all about responding to the child's cues, not your poxy paranoia that they are about to starve to death…