Sleep has been a big talking point in our house. Even before T arrived we were losing sleep. From the third trimester I was losing it thanks to just being pregnant and S was losing it because we had a Beansprout on the way.
So when T arrived we were both pretty tired, but things didn’t start out as bad as we’d expected. T slept through the night on Day 2 (which scared us more than anything as it was unexpected) and by the end of the week we were on blocks of feeds every 2-3 hours, sometimes 4. Perfect. I’ll take that.
But then a tongue-tie was found and cut, and from then on we had several sleepless nights, T often only sleeping for blocks of 40 minutes as soon as I put him down in his moses basket. We don’t think it was related to the tongue-tie but it was a funny coincidence. He just didn’t want to lay flat any more. We tried him in his travel cot (an hour max) and his carry cot (an hour) – nothing was getting us any sleep. On top of this, T then developed a cold.
T never had any issues sleeping on our chests, but we didn’t want to co-sleep at night, so it was 40 minute blocks for us.
One day, however, we read somewhere about putting a wedge underneath T’s Moses basket mattress to raise him into an angle slightly. I don’t know what prompted us to check, but we always knew he was happy propped up, whether it was against my pregnancy pillow or nursing pillow, or our normal pillows.
So we purchased a ‘Wedge Hog’ to put under his mattress. Annoyingly, apart from firmness, it’s no different to the wedge I had during pregnancy for my knees!
Anyway, we tried it out and I can honestly say it’s the best thing since sweet red peppers stuffed with cream cheese. That night, T slept through from 8:00pm to 5:00am!!!! He then had a feed and went back to sleep until 7:00am. We couldn’t believe it, but as someone kindly reminded us…
Once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence, three times is a routine…
So onto the next night… 8:00pm to 4:00am, feed, back to sleep until 7:00am. The next night… 8:00pm to 4:00am, feed, wake at 7:00am. We’ve now had two weeks of this and can’t believe our luck. We fully expect it to come crashing down once something happens, like teething, but at the moment we’re very very happy.
Of course I still wake up every now and again to check on T, but that’s expected as I’m so used to waking every 2hrs, but I soon go back to sleep. Hopefully, that habit will drop and I’ll sleep right through one night!
K
Disclosure: We are in no way sleep experts, so if you’re having baby sleep issues please only take what we did/do as a suggestion, and not actual advice. Also, we purchased the Wedge Hog with our own money.
