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May 21, 2013

Bedtime skirmishes

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Prince of bedtime - Wendy GratzOn the bedtime front, things are looking up a bit with Little O and now probably half of the nights, he drops off to sleep within 15-20 minutes of being put down. Definitely, a case of a few skirmishes here and there at bedtime, rather than the full-on bedtime battles we had been having.

We adjusted his routine so that, in addition to reading him books with him for the last half an hour before bed, we then take him to sit on the potty (which is a whole other story…) and brush his teeth and then one of us lies down in bed with him and reads him up to three bedtime stories (depending on how tired he seems) before leaving him to settle down to sleep. And, as I said, at least half of the time, he is asleep soon after.

So, bedtime seems to be working much better, apart from the fact that I start to drop off during the stories!

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photo credit: Wendi Gratz via photopin cc
  
 
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May 7, 2013

Bedtime battle

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We are having a bit of a bedtime battle with Little O these days.

While I and then Husband were on parental leave, he was used to waking at around 7am, having a leisurely breakfast and then going to preschool for a 9am start. Now that both of us are back at work, however, Little O has to be at preschool at 7.30am – on the plus side, I can pick him up earlier and we have the long spring afternoons for play.

Over the past couple of months, we have had some problems getting him to stay in bed and go to sleep before about 8.30pm. This wasn’t ever night though, so we thought that it might correlate with how much he was sleeping during the day at preschool.

So we asked them to restrict his nap to 40 minutes and crossed our fingers that this would help. And at first it did, but then we realised that some days he would nap for half an hour or so and the next he would not nap at all, and we were again seeing him appear in the living room when he should be tucked up in bed asleep. (Another problem is just how cute he looks when he runs in to chat with us after bedtime – it is hard not to be amused – bad, I know.)

We decided that, at that point, there was not so much to be done as Little O would soon be switching from a 9am to a 7.30am start at preschool, and we thought that would solve the problem after a few days.

We’re now a week in to him starting earlier and the bedtime situation is only getting worse. We’ve had evenings when he makes every excuse possible not to sleep, nights when he has got up 12-15 times, and it culminated last night with me taking him in to our bed with me at 9.40pm when he still was not asleep. And the worst is that he was so very, very tired, but so very, very determined to stay awake.

What have you done in these situations? Do you think this just needs a few more days to resolve itself? Or a should we be looking for new strategies?

It really is something when a nearly three year old is awake later than his mamma…

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Jan 14, 2013

Sleep solution… for now!

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An English Mamma in Stockholm: baby self feeding porridgeAs I may have mentioned a few times recently (!), Baby E has been waking up early in the mornings, usually at 1am, and then struggling to settle back down to sleep. We had been going in to him, soothing him, putting the music on and trying to get him to settle back to sleep himself. This has had varying results: some nights we would need to go back in 5-6 times over the next hour before he fell asleep, while other nights, he would fall back asleep within 10-15 minutes.

We have had a bit of a breakthrough this past week though. Last week, Little O had his biggest tantrum to date and just as I was feeling like a bad mamma and unable to deal with him, Husband saved the day by coming home an hour early and taking us all out for a walk. The walk turned into dinner at a local tapas restaurant that we had not visited before, and both boys surprised us with just how well they behaved. It was just what I needed to reassure me that we can cope with tantrums and difficult behaviour from Little O and that we can still occasionally have dinner out in a public place.

Just before we went out I had given Baby E dinner (Little O had refused to eat anything) but when we arrived at the tapas restaurant only an hour later, he was keen to eat again. And he ate and ate and ate. And that night he slept and slept and slept, and slept through the night.

So it seems that we have just needed to stuff him fuller than we were – which we had not thought possible as Baby E really does love his stomach. But apparently he can fit even more food in there than we had believed.

We have carried on this since then and he has slept through until 5.30am (and then settled back down to sleep) every night since. This might very well not last, but we are certainly going to enjoy it while it does!

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Jan 4, 2013

Sleep mystery

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Baby E slept through the night for the second night in a row (hooray!), so why do I feel so incredibly tired today?

Answers on a postcard, please… ;)

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Jan 3, 2013

R2BC – New Year, new start

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A shiny new year means a good point from which to start afresh with actually trying to participate in R2BC each week.

My reasons to be cheerful this week:

  • It’s 2013! A new year and a new chance to start again. I suppose it does not need to be a new year to do that, but the end of one year and the start of the next seems to draw a neat line between the two.
  • Little O is growing more and more into a little boy each day. Tantrums and meltdowns are increasing too, but hopefully with each one that happens we are getting better at dealing with them.
  • I have five and a half weeks to make the most of before I head back to work in mid-February.
  • Baby E slept through the night last night! His night sleep has been erratic these past four or five weeks (starting with waking at 5am, then 4am, then 3am and now settling at waking at 1am each morning and then settling back down after about an hour and sleeping through to around 6.30am). After Little O, who has been (and still is) a fantastic sleeper, this has come of something of a shock. But last night he slept through for the third time in the past month – yay! Long may it continue.

So, there you go: a few reasons for me to be cheerful this week.

Reasons to be Cheerful at Mummy from the Heart

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Oct 7, 2012

Bed swap

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Nina cot barnsäng kaxholmen

Kaxholmens Nina cot

Until last week, Little O has slept in his Kaxholmens cot quite happily and has done so since he was about six months old. We dropped the base of it down to its lowest setting when he started to be able to get too close to the top and we fully expected to lower the side in the next few months if he tried to climb over that.

What we did not expect was that Baby E would instead try to escape from his.

In the spring, when we were researching kitchens, we went into Nolte Kuchen and they had on display the Rocky baby and infant bed from Jäll & Tofta and it was love at first sight. The bed is fantastic. It starts as a rocking cot for the baby with a seat alongside, then it can be a toddler bed and then you can flip it over and use it a child’s bed (complete with play space underneath).

rocky jaell tofta cot bed

The Rocky from Jäll & Tofta

Baby E has been sleeping soundly in it since he was about three or four months old. Last week, however, I went in to see if he had woken from his nap and found him sitting up in the cot and leaning over the side, leaning dangerously over the side.

So, that was that. The boys needed to swap beds asap.

It was actually pretty simple to convert the bed from Baby E’s use to Little O’s. I just removed the border plank that made a cot area and the seat, took off the cushions and that was that: a new bed for Little O.

Husband did a sterling job of explaining to Little O that he was going to be sleeping in a big boy’s bed from now on and Little O was so excited to get to sleep in the bed that rocked!

Baby E settled down well that night in the Kaxholmens cot and seemed to enjoy all the extra space that he had to roll around, and Little O rocked his new bed backwards and forwards a few times and promptly fell asleep. Perfect.

On his third night in the new bed, though, we heard a thunk and then tears. Yes, Little O had fallen out of his new bed. We had not expected it as the gap for him to fall out is not that wide (only one third of the length of the bed), but know we know. He came into our bed for a couple of hours and then, in the early hours of the morning, I returned him to the Rocky. We were keen that he should not develop a fear of sleeping in the bed. However, all has gone well since then: we’ve upped the padding that he can fall onto, there have been no more falls and he wakes each morning and happily sits up and rocks the bed for a while before calling out to us.

Baby E also sleeps well in Little O’s old cot, so it seems to be win-win, so far at least.

I am so surprised at how well the changeover has gone, as I had worried that moving Little O to a toddler bed would be far more problematic than that. I guess he is just being his typical self though and rolling with whatever life throws at him. Time for his mamma to start doing the same, I think.

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Sep 24, 2012

The rule of three

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sitting baby

Sitting!

Whenever we’ve tried to change some aspect of Little O’s routine (and now Baby E’s), we’ve found that the rule of three applies: you need to persist for three days or three nights.

All the changes that we have made – changing nap times and mealtimes, changing from baby sleeping bags to a duvet, drinking välling before bedtime instead of milk, dropping the dummy during the day – all of them have worked out after we kept going at them for three nights or three days. The problem is that during day two (and even more so during night two) is when you come close to breaking point, the point where you just start thinking that this is not working, that you should just give up, that there must be an easier way to do this.

Luckily, my mother-in-law told us about the rule of three during the early days with Little O and so both Husband and I can help each other when we’re in the middle of any change, reminding the other that we only need three days or nights, that that is all it takes, and that it will be solved.

And the times when we have stopped after only two days or nights? Urgh, disastrous. Because then when you get your courage back to start making the change again, you’ve already gone through two nights of pain, but they don’t count for anything; you have to start from scratch all over again.

Now, someone please remind me of this when we start Baby E on välling in the next few weeks!

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Aug 5, 2012

Three good things – day 7

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  • Another morning spent at the playground, swinging on the swings, sliding down the slides and building and knocking over sandcastles in the sandpit. It is so much fun to watch how Little O plays and to see how much both boys love swinging on swings next to each other. Having two little boys really is an amazing thing.
  • Little O slept at lunchtime today. We must have exhausted him in the playground in the morning, but it gave Husband and I some valuable time to get some bits and pieces done in the apartment.
  • We managed to watch some of the Olympics. I got all emotional at the medal ceremony for the Men’s 10,000 metres, which I found interesting, seeing as when we were back in the UK in the summer it was the first time that I had not felt that it is “home”.

So, I’ve now completed seven days, and although I have struggled on some days, it has been a really good exercise in looking for the good in each day. So as not to bore you (and myself) any further, I am going to just take this as a weekly exercise and join in every Thursday with Reasons to be Cheerful.

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