Wednesday, January 17, 2007

More snow less sleep

Just when I thought this co-sleeping thing was the answer Wren managed to wake EVERY HOUR from 1am till 6am and then just grunted and grizzled in bed till I was forced to get up some time before 7am. Now its snowing again.

I am going to take him along to my naturopath/midwife/mother-of-5 for ideas because this is taking the glow off how well we/he is doing otherwise. I am really not fussy! I would settle for one stretch of 3 hours or a couple of 2 hour sleeps but I don't think my body can cope with a short series of catnaps for long.

It is hard not to think of this as a series of crimes and punishments. My crime yesterday was having it too easy (Sherie took Frost on a playdate for most of the day and Wren slept a lot) so the night had to be awful. Yesterday I managed to indulge by washing my hair and cleaning my teeth and finished the book I was reading about great white sharks off San Francisco (I picked it up off the New Book shelf at the library - there is no hidden significance to my reading about large lurking predators) so I should be denied the indulgence of personal time at night.

Actually, even last night could have been worse. Frost slept a lot like this (or didn't sleep a lot like this) but nursed for 30 minutes and cried torrents between his fitful episodes so I was actually sleeping even less and developed adrenaline induced insomnia. I can't even think of watching La Femme Nikita which was on reruns during the long wakeful nights with Frost. By contrast, Wren nurses for 10 minutes then falls asleep again leaving me lying crookedly half-asleep so as not to rouse him. Half is better than nothing.

My father emailed last night and said he believes that this wicked sleep behaviour is hereditary. My teenage brother and sister in South Africa apparently slept so badly as infants and toddlers that their exhausted mother took at least one of them to a pyschologist to help their sleep deviance. Ingrid (my non-wicked stepmother) has survived and is currently in Paris (there is hope!) while Ansellia and Orion are now sleeping a bit better despite the predations of World of Warcraft on Orion's biorhythms.

Now, I have written another whole update about sleeplessness. I hope this trend does not continue.

2 comments:

Wyndi said...

have you called cardiology and talked with them about his nursing and sleeping patterns and the grunting?

Shannon said...

No, I figured the sleeping and nursing were still in the realm of normal baby stuff and he has been grunting since we were in hospital and nobody felt it was something to worry about then. I mean, we know he does do a bit more work than "normal" but the cardiologists told us that the kind of structural things Wren has wrong with his heart (and had wrong) are not going to change overnight. They are hoping the left side will grow proportionally but said that it would be seen more over the period of months than weeks.

We have our first cardiology follow-up on Monday 22nd which is pretty soon.