Sleep like a baby - yeah, right!

Everyone has heard the phrase 'sleep like a baby', right?

It seems that everyone but our son understands it's meaning!

To Henry is seems that 'sleep like a baby' means to only sleep for half an hour at a time during the day, forty five minutes tops!

He fooled us into thinking that it was going to be easier this time around. For the first six weeks of his life it has difficult to keep him awake. He would sleep anywhere, through any amount of noise. His sleeps would last around 2 - 2 1/2 hours at a time. I should have known it was all too good to be true.....

These days, the boy just doesn't want to sleep!

Take this morning for example, here is what has happened so far:

6am - Henry wakes up for the day.
8am - he is put down for his first sleep of the morning. He wakes up again at 8:30am!!!!
10am - back to bed for another catnap (opps, I mean "sleep"). He doesn't want to go to sleep even though he's been rubbing his eyes like mad and yawning heaps. He is finally asleep by 10:30am after lots of rocking, white noise, swaddling etc.
11:15am - Awake once again!!

It's only 12:30 and it feels like it should be the end of the day already. I've had enough. Seriously. It's hard to adequately describe how depressing it is to be pacing around the house with a crying baby in the sling, trying to get them to sleep. You pace and pace and pace, passing mountains of washing as you go, dishes that aren't going to be washed anytime soon and all the while your toddler is screaming for attention too, but you know that if you stop moving, your baby won't go to sleep.

According to most books and websites, babies aged around 3 months need between 4-5 hours sleep during the day (broken up into two long sleeps and one shortish nap). At the moment, our son is getting around 2 hours sleep during the day in total.

For instance, one well known baby sleep manual suggests letting your baby 'self settle' after being awake two hours, and then 'waking them up' after they've been asleep for two hours, wow, that is some great advice. I can imagine parents to be reading it thinking 'that's easy - I'll just put my baby to bed and then wake them up two hours later', as if it was that simple. So when my son wakes up after only half an hour of being asleep, should I just let him lay there screaming for another hour and a half until the official 'wake up times'? nice one!

It's just depressing.

The silver lining for us though, is that Henry is an awesome sleeper at night (once he goes to sleep). He wakes up once and that's it - feeds, then goes straight back to sleep, so I can't really complain.

I just keep reminding myself that 'this too will pass'.

One day.

Good thing he's so darn cute.