I'm not sleeping more than four hours in a row ...

Our son is nearly seven months old now and he’s still not sleeping through the night. I want to go and talk to the maternal child and health nurse about the best way to do it because he’s a big six month old and he should be able to sleep right through!

I’m not ever sleeping more than four hours in a row because he is still waking once or twice a night. He wants to feed at least once, often twice, so that’s pretty tough at the moment for both my husband and I.

Our son goes to bed at 6:30pm, however we’re not going to bed until about 10:30pm. I mean we could go to bed earlier, but we want to hang out with each other! If he wakes up at 2:30pm, I feed him ‘til 3:00am and before you know it, we’re up for him at 7:00am. It’s been difficult, by the time I wake up I’m feeling pretty exhausted. But my husband is the same, we’re both pretty tired. I think you just get used to it.

With the sleeping, it’s really like the blind leading the blind. Do we pat and shush or do we do controlled crying? As we haven’t sat down and chosen a particular sleep method – we need to do some reading - every single night, in the middle of the night, we’re like, “oh, he’s awake – what do we do?”

I’d say more than half the babies in our mother’s group are sleeping through the night. It might be that some have moved on to formula now, it might also just be luck of the draw. A lot of the mums are really struggling with self-settling and are still having to rock their babies to sleep. Some are struggling with 45 minute day sleeps or some are concerned that their babies aren’t putting on enough weight so I sort of feel like in the scheme of things, even though he’s not sleeping all that well, he’s happy and healthy. You just have to take the bad with the good.

I must say our mother’s group is really good. There’s no pressure or competitiveness. While some mothers have babies that sleep through the night they’re very open about the fact that they’re tearing their hair out when their children won’t sleep during the day!

Posted in: Baby 21-26 weeks Crying settling sleeping Every baby is different Mums Your needs