I Lie Awake at Night

Do you ever think that the universe hates you?

Yesterday Olivia only woke up once, again during her usual 12-1 slot, and I went in to her room, put her dummy back in and walked out again inside 2 minutes and she went back to sleep.Without wishing to tempt fate, as it is only 3.35, but so far Olivia has slept through the night.

Brilliant! Looks like her sleeping might be getting back on track. Only, Mummy, who has a long history of insomnia, is currently sitting in the living room blogging while Daddy and Baby sleep upstairs as I am just so awake.

Sometimes I think the universe hates me.

Keep you away my love, my love, And pray I might sleep tonight

I wonder if my darling daughter will decide to wake up at one in the morning and start crying and have to come into our bed and then spend the next three hours buggering about poking Mummy in the face,attempting to stand up and bounce while holding the headboard or singing, like she has the past two nights..?

I do hope not.

Pavlovian Slaver

One really great thing we brought , worth it's weight in gold, is a night light thingie, a Tomy Winnie the Pooh Lullaby Dream show. It plays the Winnie the Pooh tune that loads of baby toys play and has a night light at the front with rotating images on as well as projecting images on the ceiling.

This has been really great as it communicates to a little girl whose grasp of English isn't great, that it is time to go to sleep and at the same time she totally loves it. A few cycles through of the song and she drifts off the sleep. There was a time when she would only nap on my lap , which as you can imagine meant I didn't get much done, but she now naps in her cot. It is sound activated so if she cries or begins to stir it activates and she goes back to sleep. This has also helped as it has meant that she gets much longer naps which makes her a much happier baby in the daytime.

I don't work for Tomy or anything :) I have just found this really great and so if any new or prospective parents are reading then this is something to think about. Olivia loves it and if we are in the bedroom she is always looking over at it as if to say 'hey Mum, where's my tunes'! We didn't really buy anything totally useless, but some of our purchases have definitely been more useful than others.

I Will Swear...

Hello, it's DaddyM here. You may remember me. I used to post here but recently I've been too busy with er... really important stuff so that I haven't had time. I can't actually remember what really important stuff it was, but it definitely happened and everything. It's not that Olivia isn't endlessly enthralling and constantly doing things worthy of note, but I've been up to my eyeballs in a big project at work, so I've had less time to Blog during the day, and time doesn't exist at home any more, at least, not in quantities large enough to actually do anything, but I'm going to give it a go now.

If you've read my blog before, you may recall that DIY tends to make me a little sweary. This is down to a couple of factors - my general incompetence at DIY and the inability of flat pack furniture makers to write instructions that make any sense whatsoever.

Olivia has a new cot. It's a lovely big Shaker-style cot/bed thing with a dropdown side that should hopefully do her until she's about six or seven. Not many pieces. Should have been the proverbial piece of piss. Was it? Was it fuck. As I say, I'm not the greatest at DIY in the world, but doing a few screws up is normally within my limits, so that wasn't the problem with this thing. It was all going along perfectly fine. I had the two ends, the bottom and the static side all done. Just the drop down side to do, so follow the instructions and all will be well.

The instruction booklet shows a diagram of how the sliding mechanism on the dropdown should engage with the retaining screws on the two ends. Unfortunately, it is not a diagram that actually makes it clear how you are achieve the effect required without having to force the dropdown through angles that are clearly not good for the paintwork. Presumably this thing can be constructed without damaging the paintwork and it's probably quite easy when you know how. But we're not going to show you. You have to guess. It was at this point that I first became quite sweary. Eventually, I did manage it and I didn't damage the paintwork either. It just cost me half a finger and any respect my wife might have for me.

It is soon after this point that you read instructions like - and this is completely true - "Pull the bottom of the end away from the dropdown until it slides into place". Eh? But in a previous step you told me to bolt piece a6 to b7. At no point in this procedure did you say, "Oh, but don't do the bolts all the way up because you'll need to make a half an inch gap leeway to slide in the side in the next step", did you, you twatmungous fuckbollocks?

Anyone know any good relaxation techniques?

At long last it was done, with a cost of some skin and some dignity, and it does look most splendid. It will look even more splendid when it goes into Olivia's own bedroom in the next few weeks. This will require dismantling it.


I feel some swearing coming on...

A Bright New Morning

I keep meaning to write about a very simple pleasure; that of holding Olivia first thing in the morning.

When she first wakes (or very occasionally, when I wake her) at about six-ish, I am tasked with taking her out of her Gro-bag and taking her to the changing table under the window. I pick her up and put her on my shoulder. If she's retained sufficient sleepiness, she pulls her head into my neck and draws her knees up, arching her back - this is a very different way of holding herself than when she's awake, when her back is straight and she hangs her legs straight down - and there is something about it that I love.

I doubt I can really put it into words. This is something that lasts the time it takes to move her from her cot, round the bed and to the window. It probably takes between five and ten seconds. Perhaps it's the trust that she has to go to sleep on me while I'm carrying her, but I'm not sure. If it happens, it's because she's sleepy, so I don't think she really has much awareness of it. Perhaps it's not so much trust in any active sense as the fact that she's not detecting anything to make it necessary to wake up, that she can just curl up and continue to sleep.

There is a rude awakening for both of us when I put her down on the changing table and remove the nappy.

Note: This is not by MummyM at all. This is Blogger playing silly buggers, since I am definitely logged in as myself.

Wide Awake On the Edge of the World

A rather harrowing weekend, I think it would be fair to say.

I had to go to a meeting in a small town in Bedfordshire on Saturday. What with it being about 90 miles away, and the meeting itself being a couple of hours, that was most of the day gone.

Whilst I'd been enjoying the thrills of Britain's motorway system, K___ had been picked up by Suzy (I was going to write S___, but since she's forever coming on here and commenting every time we mention her, using a Blogger name that makes it abundantly clear what her real name is, I'm not going to bother) and spent the afternoon with her and her three kids, her husband, our friend M (who again does not require underscores because he really does go under the name 'M') another couple of their friends and the bloke who had turned up to rip out the old and install a new kitchen without any warning that he was going to do so. Plus another couple of kids and a dad. Oh, and the other mum and three kids that arrived as we were leaving. A little bit of a mad house it's not unreasonable to say, though in the nicest possibly way, of course.

K___ had been there for most of the afternoon by the time I arrived and Olivia hadn't spent very much of it asleep, and we know what a baby without much sleep means. Horrible evening. Continuing the sleep theme, my Dad called up to say that my brother was going to be down for the night, and could they please have their pillows back that they'd lent us? Since we had bought replacements and had them on the spare bed for a good while now, it really was a little naughty not to have given them back before now. With all of this in mind, we left Suzy's quite soon afterwards.

With just a quick stop at ours to pick up the pillows, it was round to my folks'. Thereafter followed a misunderstanding about waking Olivia that, a couple of hours later, resulted in K___ and I shouting at each other. I'm not going to go into details, because neither of us come out of it looking terribly great - it was fundamentally rather trivial, and raking it up again for your enjoyment, dear reader, would be a bit tragic. The pertinent facts are that when it came to her last meal of the day, (taken as I sat in the other room stewing over our row), Olivia was extremely sleepy and reluctant to drink. Eventually, K___ had to admit defeat after just two ounces of a usual six.

K___ and I made up after a bit of sitting in different rooms and smarting. We agreed that babies can frazzle you. At about eleven thirty - a little on the late side for us these days - we got up and went to our bedroom, expecting to quietly go to bed, a plan that was slightly scuppered by the sight of a tiny baby with glistening, slimy vomit caked over half her head and face, Grobag and mattress. We hadn't heard a thing. As K___ sorted a new Grobag and sheet for the baby's mattress, I took her into the bathroom and tried to get her cleaned up. The chuck was a mixture of milk and mucus and there was no way this was going to come off with just a sponge. She needed a full hair wash, so I had to wait for K___. Fortunately, Olivia seemed rather unfussed by the whole thing, even quite smiley. She certainly wasn't as fussed as one might imagine she'd be. We got her washed and dried and put into a new Grobag.

We decided that as the baby had only had two ounces anyway, we needed to feed her. It was clear that it had all come up in the incident, and it wasn't really on to expect her to sleep without any food. I made her a new bottle and K___ tried to get her to take it. We thought she'd be ravenous. Nope. After twenty minutes she'd given up and had barely had two ounces again. At least that was back to the starting position. We decided that if she was going to need feeding in the night, we'd just have to put up with it. There are plenty of new parents who have to do it, so it would hardly kill us.

We turned out the light, and started to settle. It was five past midnight when the baby honked all over herself for the second time. Still, we thought as we settled down to sleep at half past twelve, at least Sunday can't be as bad...

At That Time of the Night

Well...
Miss on Wednesday evening Miss Olivia went to bed at 9 and slept till 6am. Last night she had a nap in the evening and then went down in her crib at 10pm and we woke her at 7am to feed her. Star baby! She still has her nights when she wakes at 3 or 4 but she only ever wakes once if she does and she seems to be starting to get into a better routine. Hooray - not bad for 6 weeks old! It is also nice that she is settling down in the evenings and the screaming routine isn't something she does every day. I was worried about going out for the evening with her as she might just screem the whole time and ruin it for other people but it seems like there is light at the end of the tunnel and even if she still has her moments she will settle down. Apparently 6 weeks is when the crying peaks and then after that it starts to tail off.

Now all I have to do is stop F_ snoring!