All Better

Cardi by Donna

Last week, I went to a picnic with some other cloth nappy mums. They were all discussing sleep problems, and how each kid is worse than the last. I felt pretty left out – my child sleeps!

He’s been so amazingly, marvellously, wondrously calm, and happy to sleep (in his cot) when he gets tired. He sleeps in the car, he even sleeps in my arms when there isn’t a cot available. It’s been great for both of us (and Mark too!), and I feel like I deserve it. We’ve had enough grief.

I explained to the other mums about his new sleep habits, and about my magic solution. Antibiotics! It won’t work for everyone, but after all we’ve been through, I feel like having a baby without sleep issues is perfectly just and fair.

Then on Friday last week he stopped. We left him with mum and dad while we went out for dinner. I wanted to get him to sleep before we left, but after two hours of full body thrashing, screaming, fighting and kicking, I was at a loss. At first I thought it was just because he was in unfamiliar territory, but when he was still out of sorts the next day, I began to suspect that something else was going on.

He refused to sleep in his cot all weekend, and on Sunday he screamed all day. I was so wound up, when Daisy crapped in my bathroom, I lost it, and smacked him. I can’t really explain how bad this makes me feel, poor old Daisy is a bit senile, and I understand that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. And hitting an animal is never defensible. So you can tell that I was at a pretty low ebb when I hit out like that. Sleep deprivation destroys rational thought, and I think that having slept well for two months (since the antibiotics), going back to the bad old days was a bit of a shock to the system.

By monday, he was not sleeping until he screamed himself to exhaustion. I started to think we might be dealing with another infection. On sunday I refilled his antibiotic script. The last lot of antibiotics didn’t have a “Discard on” date sticker on them, and I just forgot. We got almost to the end of the bottle before Mark pointed out that they were probably out of date. So now he’s had the new lot of drugs for a few days, and last night he slept in his cot for the first time in almost a week. And all of us slept well. In fact, some of us slept so well, we were late for work 🙂

And now a little something for the afro fans out there…

Thanks to Chris for the great pic!