our toad

With all new babies, little miss Scarlett gets her days and nights mixed up. She sleeps through the day like a trooper, sometimes had to be woken up for her feed and sleep through all the noise and the buzz going around her. Come night time, she would turn into a wide-eye owl, who only takes short spurts of sleep, grunting, snorting, fussing every hour and along the way make funny noises that babies make.

Having said that, she has started to make progress. Lately, she starts to sleep through the night, only to be woken up by me for a night feed every 3 or 4 hours (as opposed to day time feeds every 2 – 3 hours). I tend to set my alarm and wake her up for feeds, rather than wait till she starts crying, because I find that this way, it helps to nip the crying in the butt and its easier to put her back to sleep after feeding. I found out that if we wait till she starts to cry, that would be too late because by than, she would be starving and would be hard to comfort her back to sleep. I speak from experience and eyebags under my eyes live to tell the tale.

I don’t deny that night shifts are hard, especially now that i’m pretty much doing it solo since John has gone back to work as I let him sleep through the night because I know he needs it. Nothing is far worse than a sleep deprieved man at work. Although he does gets up and help me when things get out of hand, i.e. crying uncontrollably but so far so good. Lucky for me, I have my mum here with us and she’s a godsend. Whenever things get too hard, I’ll just knock on her door and pass the baby to her and no matter at what time of the night it is, she’s more than happy to take it over from me. I don't know what I'll do when she goes back home.

Lucky for us parents, this phase will soon pass and needless to say I can't wait for bubba to get a little older so we can start implementing a sleep routine for her so we can all be sane again.