Sleeping through the night...

NOT.

DN is 1 year, 2 months and 10 days old and he is still not sleeping through the night. Those of you with kids are probably going, "What?!" (as in, "I'd better start being kind to animals to earn good karma so it doesn't happen to me next time.") Those of you without kids are also probably going, "What?!" (as in, "What's the big deal?")

Oh childless ones, let me initiate you into the mutually exclusive worlds of babies and YOUR sleep. In the famous words of JK Rowling, "neither can live while the other survives." In other words, as long as you have a baby, you can kiss sleep goodbye. If you want to sleep for 8 hours at a stretch, DON'T HAVE A BABY. Get a hamster.

Just before I gave birth, a good friend told me, "Sleep as much as you can now." "Bah!" I thought. And I continued reading until 1am, watching midnight movies, surfing the internet at midnight... tsk tsk... sheer folly! In the wise words of my grandmother, "Can sleep, don't want to sleep. Silly girl."

Since DN's birth (1 yr, 2 mths & 10 days ago), I have had less than 10 nights of uninterrupted sleep. You don't know just how much I miss sleeping like a normal human being, from 11pm to 7am.

This is what DN's sleeping pattern looks like now...

8.30 pm --> Sleep.
10.30 pm --> Fuss. Pacifier has fallen out.
12.30 am --> Cry. Needs to nurse before can fall asleep.
4.30 am --> Cry. Needs to nurse before can fall asleep.
7.00am --> Wake up!

Because there are chores to complete and sometimes marking, I don't usually sleep until I've nursed DN at 12.30am. Then I wake up at 4.30am to nurse him one more time and then I'm up for the day at 7.00am. It's been like this for over a year and I can now pass off as China's national animal quite easily.

I am so not suited for this.

When I was young, my mother used to say that earthquakes cannot wake me up!
In secondary school, I used to sleep until 1pm on weekends!
Sometimes when DN cries, I manage to convince myself that it's a dream (or nightmare actually) and go back to sleep!

I don't know why it's happening to me. I'm a good person! I am kind to animals (squashing ants doesn't count right?) , I donate to the Community Chest monthly (running away from the donation-tin-wielding students along Orchard Road doesn't count right?) and I keep the house clean without a helper (washing the curtains only before Chinese New Year is okay right?).

We tried the cry-it-out method, but I gave up after 2 nights. It wasn't that we couldn't sleep through DN's crying, because we did. Like babies! Wait, I want to know who coined that so I can hammer the bugger. I think he meant baby SLOTHS. I just couldn't go through with the cry-it-out method and let DN cry for hours because I just felt sooo guilty.

We tried tiring him out during the day. Sometimes it worked, most times it didn't.

Many have suggested tanking him up on formula milk but DN cannot drink normal FM because he's allergic to cow's & goat's milk. He can only drink soya-based FM and he hates that. So he's still on 100% breastmilk which is easier to digest. That's probably why he gets hungry so quickly.

It's tiring being DN's "Meals-on-Wheels"!