Sleeping

• life

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

[imported from livejournal and backdated]

Everyone keeps asking “Is he a good baby?” Huh?! Good in what sense? Apparently a “good” baby doesn’t cry much and sleeps lots.

Rightio then.

Tiny slept through the night last night. The night lasted from midnight to 7 something. He had an extremely saturated nappy when we woke up in the morning but seeing as he didn’t wake up for his usual in between change and top up, was to be expected I guess.

Was nice getting to sleep 7 hours in a row rather than in two 4 hour blocks. Though it did make me feel more tired coz I had more sleep. It doesn’t make any sense but that’s the way it seems to work.

I joke about how Tiny is such a cruisy bub coz I trained (in kung fu of the Choy Lay Fut Buk Sing variety) up til I was 8 months pregnant, then I stopped coz the school was going to close and I felt too fat. I tell people Tiny is so cruisy as well coz I carry him all the time.

I get pissed off with people who insist that controlled crying works (apparently they’re selling it under the label “controlled comforting” so it has less negative connotations but it’s the same fricken thing). They insist that it teaches the child to put themselves to sleep if you mostly ignore them when they’re crying and only come in at set intervals to comfort them. What they conveniently neglect to mention is that being ignored when they’re calling for their mother stresses the baby out. Long term effects nothing, they can’t prove or disprove it either way (or haven’t yet), the baby gets upset when it’s not responded to.

What the hell is wrong with people? If someone cries out for help, they can within reason expect a fairly speedy response. If they get ignored they feel unloved and unwanted (and in the case of people who desperately needed help and people ignored them, they kill themselves). Yet somehow it’s perfectly okay for a baby to be put through that shit because people delude themselves into believing that a baby doesn’t feel that kind of stuff.

Yes we are well aware that the baby is loved and safe wherever it got put down to sleep. But how the hell is it expected to know that? Considering most people expect the baby to sleep all by itself in its own cot and in its own room it wakes up alone and freaks out.

(I’ll admit at this point that I was all ready to stuff Tiny into his own cot in his own room, then he was born and I wanted him close by all the time)

Most people lose sleep coz they have to get up to feed the baby all the time. A lot of people reckon that they can’t co-sleep. Sometimes they can’t if they have a hard night out or if one or both parents smoke. But they reckon they can’t handle having the baby in the bed with them. How the hell did they get used to having their partner in the bed?

Don’t answer that.

I think we get heaps of sleep coz Tiny sleeps in the bed with us. We used to put him down in his cot and bring him into the bed when he woke up crying for a feed. Now we just have him in the bed and on the occasions when he’s not requiring a change he doesn’t even cry much, he whimpers and sometimes flails, I roll over and feed him, we’re both half asleep or fully asleep.

So yes. Tiny is a cruisy baby coz he knows that when he’s not being carted around with us, if he calls we will be there as quick as we can, he knows he is secure sleeping between us (or tucked up under my arm when he’s on the outside of the bed). And that ladies and gentlemen, not this controlled crying and “teaching them to be independent” bullshit, is what makes him a “good” baby.

And now that’s off my chest. Yes.

I should start making this house safe for a mobile baby. I have no idea how far off crawling Tiny is but he’s giving it his all. I had to warn JJ that he is able to kick himself up the change table now so we have to keep a closer eye on him when changing him. Happens :)

I should put up some head lifty photos. Maybe when I’m feeling less slack (yeh like that will ever happen…)

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License