Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Babies and Sleep

I was extremely lucky as a new mother, my sister was able to stay with me and my husband for the first week of Charlie being at home with us and then my mother stayed with us for two weeks after that. Because of the additional help in the first 3 weeks I was not the typical sleep deprived new mother as I had them to help in between feedings which gave me time to nap when needed. I can not say enough how much having the two of them there helped me and made such a huge difference. If you can, accept help like this in your irate few weeks after childbirth, it will keep you sane.


It also helped that Charlie was not and still is not a colicky or fussy baby. My biggest issue was for the first 6 weeks she required a nipple shield to assist in breast feeding. Although this saved me from having to revert to formula and took away a lot of potential stress, they are not conducive to night time side feeding which meant I had to get into the sitting position and feed her in the cradle hold making it harder for me to fall asleep afterwards. Now that that isn't an issue we have been enjoying relatively peaceful nights even with night feelings as Charlie "dream feeds" and never really wakes between 9pm and 5:30am.


We've also fallen quietly nicely into our nap routine.

With all that said I'm currently holding my breath. At only 16 weeks old Charlie is exhibiting all of the signs of teething which have left her fussier then normal in the evenings and last night the two us didn't go to sleep until almost midnight. Not because she was crying but she was just awake. I'm hoping things remain okay and I'm not writing another post in a few weeks about my lack of sleep!

1 comment:

  1. 16 weeks?! You must have been sleep deprived writing this or too lazy to edit!
    Time for a new post!

    ReplyDelete