Sleep (or a Lack Thereof)

We’re stuck without internet because my parents are upgrading to fibre optic and...well BT/useless calls centres/stupid bureaucracy.  Do I need to say more?  Three days without internet so far and an engineer out today who doesn’t seem optimistic.  My teenage sisters are thrilled.  So, I’m writing this in MS Word and will put it on the blog once I have access to the world again at some point.  I thought I’d write about sleep because people obsess over things they can’t have so – other than internet access – sleep is something I fantasise about a lot right now.

Whenever you complain about being pregnant, everyone tells you, ‘this is the easy part; just wait ‘til you have the baby and don’t get any sleep for months and months.’  The funny thing is, once you have the baby everyone starts asking if they’re sleeping through yet.  So, after being warned babies and sleep are like...two things that don’t go well together (look, I’m not good with similes and metaphors) you suddenly feel like a failure if your tiny baby who has only been in the big bad world for a few weeks and needs to feed all the time because they have a really teeny tummy isn’t sleeping 8pm-8am every night.

Babies and sleep are chalk and cheese...no too much of a cliché (and also, what’s that about?  Why chalk and cheese?  Just because they’re alliterative?  I don’t know).

Tyger was not a good sleeper.  Well, to start with he was because he was jaundiced and not getting much milk due to a tongue tie and...that’s probably a future blog post.  But in the longer term he was – and I think this is the technical term – a little bugger when it came to sleep.  For a few months the Wolf got me to express milk through the day so he could feed Tyger in the evening whilst I got a couple of hours of precious sleep (oh yeah, if you don’t have kids yet: sleep becomes a commodity that can be traded and gifted when you have a baby).  But then the Wolf’s night shifts started (his old job sucked) and I had to largely go it alone.  The night was along the lines of putting Tyger to bed and him sleeping for an hour or so and then around the time I’d go to bed he’d wake up screaming and I’d be stuck in a loop of feeding and trying to get him down in his cot with the occasional break where he’d sleep for anything from a few minutes to maybe an hour if I was lucky until around 4am when I’d break and take him into bed with me so I could get a little sleep and to stop me from doing anything Social Services would disapprove of (although, let’s face it, they probably disapprove of co-sleeping as well because everyone seems to).

Hmm...babies and sleep are like oil and water?  I thought I was being slightly original there but a quick google has assured me this is a cliché as well.

At a little over nine months it was like someone flipped a switch on Tyger (why oh why could I not find that switch myself??) and his sleep dramatically improved to the point where within a few weeks he was sleeping through every night.  Basically, he was suffering from trapped wind every night until his stomach matured enough for him to deal with it without the, I'm assuming, agonising pain.

Baby Bear is – I’m hoping – just starting to improve with his sleep.  Maybe he has less of a switch and more one of those dials like a dimmer switch.  He’s still far worse than most babies his age but bad is an improvement on terrible so I’m still happy.  I have also been much more relaxed about the whole sleep thing this time round.  I deliberately co-slept for the first few months, knowing it would make my life easier and actually wouldn't mean Baby Bear was still sleeping in the marital bed when he was 35 with a family of his own.  I stopped when it got to the point where I was waking up feeling like an 80 year old every morning because of the amount of hip pain I had from contorting myself into bizarre shapes every night (Baby Bear is a BIG baby) and when Baby Bear got so rolly polly he rolled right off the bed one day (not when we were sleeping but I was still rather paranoid after that) but I was willing to give it a go for a while this time.

Anyway, for the time being I'm still getting a very broken sleep every night but I am keeping faith this will stop soon.  But if these blog posts are ever a little incoherent you can go ahead and blame that on sleep deprivation.

Babies and sleep go together as well as Tiny Tyger and vegetables.  Yeah, that's probably a little specific.  I'll try to work on the whole imagery thing for future posts, okay?

Not on Vegetarianism (Does Tyger Have Asperger's?)

Tyger is already moaning at me for not paying attention to him so we'll see how far through this I actually get before giving up and posting it unfinished (I know there's a 'save' button but if I kept working on posts until I liked them, I'd never post anything anywhere right now).

So, for one thing, the Gro Clock is still working really well.  For a child we very much suspect has Asperger's, it is the perfect visual prompt for bedtime and getting up time.  I'd highly recommend it.

And...I have an upset Tiny Tyger on my lap (I had the audacity to tell him off for spitting his milk out) asking for 'Piggle Piggle' and 'Uh Dezzy' (Iggle Piggle and Upsy Daisy are two characters from the TV show In the Night Garden, which is like The Magic Roundabout of today.  It's like crack for kids and annoys the hell out of me because of it's weird problems with perspective and...anyway...).

And so the post has been derailed.  I was going to write about vegetarianism and the ethics of bringing up Tyger and Baby Bear as vegetarians (and whether, as parents, the Wolf and I are imposing our lifestyle on them etc.) but my focus on that has been somewhat shifted and I imagine Baby Bear will be awake soon so...

ASD.

One of my sisters was recently diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome (AS).  This is a label no longer used in the US but is often still used here in the UK.  Some people might know it as 'High Functioning Autism', or simply Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) but it probably doesn't matter too much since it is all part of a spectrum, anyway, and one of those labels really tells you what - specifically - my sister has problems with.  A very, very brief overview would be to say she has problems with change or transitions, she has high levels of anxiety - especially about social interactions, she has 'meltdowns' (which mean as a 15 year old she will still occasionally get to the point where she rolls around on the ground or bangs her head off things or can't stop wailing or some combination) when she is overwhelmed, she needs a predictable routine in place and all sorts of other things.  Of course, that doesn't tell you much and there's so much more to it but...Baby Bear awake soon etc. (also, I have to put a chicken in a Fire Engine).

What I was getting at is it runs in our family (my dad also has AS but has never been formally diagnosed and there are diagnoses of Autism on both my mum and dad's sides of the family) and I have a reasonablish knowledge of AS.

So, we're pretty sure Tyger is an Aspie.  Maybe next time or the time after (if I actually write that veggie one next time) I'll actually run through some of the reasons for this.  The health visitors who did his two year check said it was too early to tell (and, hey, he makes eye contact and has a good grasp of language so that's a good sign, right? - nevermind that these are irrelevant when it comes to AS) and will get in touch again in four to six months to reassess and possibly refer him.  And that's fine because you might only get one shot at a diagnosis and right now a lot of his possible 'traits' might just be normal for his age so waiting until he's older and should have outgrown these things really does make sense.

But it feels dishonest to say he has Asperger's when he doesn't have a diagnosis yet and might not for years.  Yet it feels just as dishonest to say he doesn't.

I don't know.  Best wishes.

Fracking Gro Clock

I decided recently it was time to stop using a baby monitor for Tyger for several reasons, one which being we'll need the monitor for Baby Bear soon as he's getting far too big for the set up we have in our bedroom so will have to go into his own room (sob) in the near future.

Anyway, I bought Tyger a Gro Clock to help with this transition (and largely to help me with it, too).  For those of you who haven't come across these devices before it's basically a digital clock that displays a big star with twelve little stars around it through the night and as the night progresses the stars disappear until it gets to the time you have programmed in as your 'getting up time' when a yellow sun takes the place of the stars (it also glows blue through the night so doubles as a night light).

Well, it was a massive hit.  He loves clocks (or, as he unfortunately pronounces it 'cocks') and generally anything electrical/lit up etc. and particularly likes stars right now (which he calls - are you ready for the Goram cuteness - 'twinkles').  I had some problems setting it up because when your five month old decides there's really no need for sleep before midnight most nights (and still wakes up for at least one feed in the night) and your two year old thinks 5.30 onward is an acceptable time to get up your brain turns to mush.  So, for the first night I did little better than bash the - only three - buttons with my fingers and hope for the best.  I was sort of under the impression you needed to set a bedtime as well as a getting up time (you don't) and actually set the nap time instead and...not-that-long-but-too-long-to-bother-with-here story short the stars stayed on until 7.30 pm.

Anyway, I fixed that last night and Tyger just loves his new cLock.  It actually helps him to stay in bed (before he was fine whilst he got his bedtime story but as soon as you left the room he'd get out of bed, go to the door and scream) because he just lies there and watches the clock until he goes to sleep.  I think he also stayed in bed this morning until the 'sun' came out (6am).

The down side is the same down side we have with anything Tyger likes: he's very obsessive.  It's hard to do anything nice with him because he screams when it's time to stop and it's hard to buy him anything he can't have with him all the time because...well, he wants it with him all the time.  So, all morning he's been telling me he wants me to show him this fracking clock.  He's not the sort of toddler who can be trusted with a run of the whole house (even in a bungalow) so this would involve me taking him through the two separate baby gates and then lifting him up to see the clock (it's on a set of drawers).  Fine, except then he'd scream as soon as I took him away again.  He'd scream if I left him in there by himself.  And he'd even eventually scream if I just let him look at it and didn't make the 'stars' come out and re-enact 'bedtime' again and again and again.

So, it's easier to do nothing and let him get upset about that.