Christmas Eve had many of the ingredients we had hoped for in a near picture book scene: presents piled up under the tree (the vast majority for Oliver), carols playing in the background and Oliver playing happily on his playmat. Unfortunately it also then turned out to be Oliver's worst night yet in terms of refusing to go to sleep.
It had all started so well with a trip out for coffee and last minute shopping for Christmas dinner. Oliver stayed awake long enough in his "Santa's Little Helper" outfit (complete with Santa Claus hat) to smile winningly at a series of cooing women who encountered him in Somerfield and Room 311.
In the evening Hayley took him upstairs to feed him but as soon as he had drunk as much milk as he wanted he started to whinge and then cry when put to bed. He was clearly very tired - falling asleep when being fed and rubbing his eyes when put into his cot - but was determined that he didn't want to go to sleep and somehow found reserves of energy to cry as loudly as possible.
As happened earlier this week, he would stop crying when we turned the light on or shone light into the cot. After consoling him for a while and putting him back in his cot a couple of times we decided we had to try letting him cry just a few minutes before returning to him. This was very hard. We took it in turns to come back up and console him until he'd go back into his cot, but it took a couple of attempts before he finally settled.
Perhaps it was because he was so tired after this exertion that he slept until 7.20am this morning (Christmas Day), despite having been fed at 8pm yesterday evening. So when he woke we kept him up rather than let him go back to sleep.
I have to say it is getting a little stressful having to deal with this every night and it is particularly hard as we don't know for sure what the best thing is to do. One thing I am sure of is that things can't go on like this indefinitely. I suspect that we may have to go through some short term pain for long term gain. Certainly we have friends who let their baby cry for 20 minutes (which must have seemed an eternity!) until she went to sleep and after a few nights had no more problems. But there have been a few dissenting voices about doing this at too young an age, even for a just few minutes. My personal feeling is moving towards the conclusion that if Oliver is old enough to manipulate us like this, he is old enough to learn that he can't get away with it. (Well, not always anyway!) Nonetheless, it's hard to see and hear him cry. I'm still hoping we can find some other way to persuade him to go to sleep.
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