First Night Away

It’s back to work and it all started with a trip to Paris with an overnight stay.

On the one hand, with junior’s sleep patterns meaning little opportunity to rest at night, a stay in a quiet hotel and a comfy bed seemed a great idea. On the other, I have missed my wife and little one a great deal. It has meant that I have had a relatively poor night’s sleep in which I had a lot of quite vivid dreams along with unrefreshing sleep. In reality, I would have far preferred to be at home.

We are still none the wiser on what is causing this nocturnal behaviour of his. It seems on the face of it a problem with wind, particularly in the lower digestive system and bowels as we don’t have too much problem getting raucous burps from the tummy. The baby is pooing like a good ‘un so it does not seem to be constipation and the books only really illustrate the problem of colic which, to our minds, is a much more intense condition – we are not at 3 hours of inconsolable screaming yet but we do get short bursts and very disturbed patterns of sleep so we are on the way.

We have changed the feeding bottles on top up milk. We have thought about whether the SMA formula is causing a reaction – we know he is getting far more of it than he should as my wife has had a lot of problems in her own milk production. The baby still sleeps reasonably well during the day but neither of us have mastered this concept of just sleeping whenever we can we both think we should be doing something in the daytime. Certainly, I have never been one to be able to sleep anywhere but in bed and at night, at that. My wife has borne the brunt of it in the last few days as she has designated that my going back to work is so important that I should have some good sleep in order not to turn up like a zombie. That means I feel really guilty that I am not pulling my weight in all this parenting and probably caused my own poor night’s sleep last night. So it means that both of us are suffering, though she far more than I.

I am back home tonight and I will be putting in a full nightshift as I am working at home for the rest of the week and so I can afford to get up a little later than normal for work and still be at my desk and phone for 8.30am. I shall also be looking at helping my wife get some sleep during the day by taking junior with me downstairs and having him by me while I work. That may not be entirely practical as when I make business calls, having even a moaning baby in the background let alone a crying one does not portray the ideal professional image. This all needs to be worked carefully otherwise my wife will simply be getting up during the day as well as I am locked on the phone.

We have no doubt that this will all even itself out and a decent pattern of sleep will emerge as junior’s digestive system matures. My sister happily told us that it was a mere 7.5 weeks before her boy slept a full night – that extra 4.5 weeks seems a real mountain to climb right now.
But this is but a minor problem in the face of the joy that this little one has brought us. He is universally loved and he cuddles each of us so lovingly each time we pick him up that you just don’t want a miss a second of his life. I read a poem circulating from a young girl dying of cancer yesterday which was about slowing down so that we do not miss a second of life because it is only when you are in her situation that you realise that time is the precious commodity when you know you have little of it left.

But as a maxim, I think it’s a good one for us all to adopt in this world that runs at a million miles an hour.