Fed up!

I'm fed up.

Fed up because despite doing everything we can to make bedtime a pleasant and peaceful experience for Oliver he clearly hates it. The fact we start to lower the lights, reduce stimulation to him, read him a story and then take him up to his dimly lit bedroom all serves only to make him upset. He knows he is going to bed and he invariably objects to some degree. It varies between whimpering and outright wailing.

I can't help feeling part of the problem is the lack of a consistent bedtime. We are being advised by our health visitor to feed him on demand. This means that his feeds don't happen at regular times throughout the day and the last feed of the day - which we usually finish in his room before putting him to bed - can happen at varying times through the evening. What tends to happen (though there is no guarantee) is that he gets up a bit later each day and ends up going to bed later. This doesn't seem a good thing for him and it is certainly not good for his parents. How can it make sense to just feed on demand if he is getting no sort of routine and sometimes ends up going to bed overtired?

Fortunately Hayley is very patient about the whole situation. It frustrates me because the advice from the various sources is at best variable and at worst contradictory, vague and confusing. When I say "sources" I am including magazines such as the Parenting Magazine from the NCT and Mother and Baby. I am not saying their advice is wrong - far from it - they are the experts and I'm sure it must be based on experience. But when advice comes for "your baby" and doesn't say how old that baby should be for the advice to make sense, then the reader is in danger of doing presicely the wrong thing.

For example, yesterday Hayley read in "Mother and Baby" magazine that it is not good to keep picking your baby up from his cot if he cries at bedtime because he will keep crying to be picked up again. The advice from our health visitor on the other hand is that we should respond to him and pick him up. What are we to do in the face of such entirely contradictory advice!

Last night, on top of all this, he slept only 5 hours before waking at 2.30am. I tried to give him his dummy and re-assure him but he needed a feed and drank the whole bottle. So now we are wondering whether the time is near to start him on solids, as waking in the night like this is said to be a sign.

Today Hayley has tried to keep his daytime sleep down to 2-3 hours by playng with him. And tonight she has tried something new for bedtime. She took him upstairs to play in his nursery for a while before lowering the lights, reading him a story, giving him his bottle and putting him down to sleep. She has done this at 8 o clock as she is keen to try to start to impose a routine. This comes in the light of conversations today with other Mums who have babies just a few weeks older than Oliver. As I type it is 9pm and he has been asleep for half an hour at the first attempt. Let's hope it's not a one-off.

Would I be asking too much for him to sleep through the night too? I thought as much!