"Happy Holidays"? What holiday?!

What a Christmas break we've had. We've been on a treadmill of waking kids by night, fractious kids by day and illness at all hours.

The latter has been primarily suffered by me but it's hard to tell with the kids. Even now Oliver loses all ability (and/or will) to communicate in the night when he wakes crying. When he's clearly upset I can understand this. But other times his 'crying' will stop the moment I come in and he is absolutely fine. Then he will just lie there not answering me when I ask him what's wrong. But if I try to leave he starts to cry again (although once he realises I'm not coming straight back in he will stop, as if it's not worth the effort). The most I get out of him if I do go back in and ask him what's wrong is an "Errrrmmmm..." as he tries to think how to detain me longer, or possibly a request to get up at 4am. Often I think he just wants to know I am there. The difficulty is in spotting the times when he is really fine and when he is genuinely poorly. The boy who cried wolf springs to mind.

Oliver has developed a really strange tendency to wake after about 2-3 hours sleep. Often he is soaked in sweat, regardless of how warm or cold I have made his room, but other times there is no sweating and no visible reason why is he should wake so upset. We've seen the doctor about this and he just said (in so many words) that he probably just naturally sweats a lot.

The tricky thing for us now is to spot when he is forming a habit of needing us to come in to him for no other reason than he wants us to be there. We already went through the pain of progressing him to sleeping through the night without our intervention. But in reality, today he is no longer consistently doing so. At this rate we'll be going through it again with Oliver just when we need to do the same with Lucy. Or maybe I'm just being gloomy and pessimistic due to lack of sleep.

Lucy is waking some nights, as many as three times, though she never needs to feed. Other nights she will sleep right through. As she is approaching the weaning phase it's understandable that this wakefulness might occur. She is currently drinking five 7-ounce bottles a day, made up of four scoops of Aptamil-2 and three of Apatamil-1. She seemed to get constipated when we moved her to just Aptamil-2, hence her personalised blend as we phase in Aptamil-2 more slowly. But overall Lucy is still a very easy-going, contented baby and thank goodness that's the case.

So as the "holiday" draws to a close, I am still ill, on antibiotics and being deprived of sleep by illness even if the kids sleep relatively well. It's almost enough to make you look forward to going back to work.