You know all that stuff THEY warn you about when you have a baby?
PUT them down drowsy but awake or they’ll ALWAYS sleep on you.
Don’t feed them to sleep or they’ll turn into a gremlin.
Teach them to self-settle or they’ll NEVER learn to fall asleep by themselves.
Babies need 16 hours of sleep a day or bad, bad things will happen…
Don’t let them sleep on you or the world will end. That kind of thing.
Well, it’s all bollocks. Continue reading
Tearfulness, anxiety, loss of or increased appetite, exhaustion, lack of motivation and irritability are all symptoms of sleep-deprivation.
They are also symptoms of depression.
This coupled with the fact that depression can lead to exhaustion and exhaustion can make you feel low is why so many cases of postnatal depression go undiagnosed.
The mother often believes she is just totally and utterly shattered and that she’d be fine if she could JUST GET SOME BLOODY SLEEP! Continue reading
A STEP BY STEP GUIDE TO BABIES BY BABIESLESSON 2: AN IDIOT’S GUIDE TO SLEEPING OUTSIDE THE WOMB
Babies wake up during the night because they are babies and it is what they do. This is a fact.
Yet, so many proper grown up people who have been to school and everything, some who have even written books about babies will not accept this.
They try and work out how to fix us when in actual fact we are just BEING BABIES and sleeping outside of mummy’s lush womby palace kind of takes some getting used to.. Continue reading
TRYING to get a baby to fall asleep is a frustration that every parent will face at some point. And while some children drift off to dreamland fairly easily, others, however, just do not.
Neither of my babies liked to go to sleep. Some nights it could take anything up to four hours to get them to doze off, so I spent a lot of time desperately browsing the Internet for The Answer. As a result, I tried a lot of weird and wonderful techniques. Here are a few ways I tried and failed to get my babies to go the f**K to sleep:
When you feel really strongly about something so you plan to write an intelligent, strongly worded article that will CHANGE THE WORLD but…..this happens…
There once was a woman who lived in a shoe
She had so many children; she didn’t know what to do
Why did she live in a shoe you may say?
Because rent for a house she could not pay,
She ‘just managed’ to put food on the table
Perhaps broth with bread, when she was able. Continue reading
Remember before you had children when you and your partner used to have ‘biscuits’?
Really good biscuits that you could eat whenever and wherever you liked – in bed, on the sofa or even in the bath.
You would try all sorts of biscuits together; sometimes you would enjoy the comfort of a digestive, other times you would eat a whole packet of Hob Nobs just because you COULD.
Then you have babies and you struggle to find the time or energy to have any biscuits at all. You start to worry;
“What if we go off biscuits forever?’
“Are all the other parents having biscuits?”
“Will my partner eat biscuits with someone else? Someone with more energy and a whole tin full of home-baked cookies?”
“What if we NEVER EVER get to eat biscuits together again?” Continue reading
The Internet is great for parents. Not only can you find information on ALL THE STUFF, there are an abundance of chat forums, Facebook groups and websites where you might just find your ‘virtual village’.
However, there are a few people who just have to ruin it for everyone…
The Dicks.
You meet. You fall in love. You get married. Your life is all love, laughter and romance…
Then you have kids and SHIT GETS REAL. Candlelit dinners and nights of passion take a back seat and you ask yourselves ‘Are we still madly in love with each other?
Here are a few signs that you are so totally in love (and you definitely do not need to read an Internet list for confirmation):
Have you forgotten what it is like to sleep for an entire night?
Do you hate 4am? Why do babies often refuse to go back to sleep at 4am?
Do you regularly Google ‘can you die from lack of sleep?’ ‘Why the hell is my baby still awake?’ or ‘why won’t my baby stay asleep?’ Continue reading
For many of us, sleep-deprivation is an unavoidable aspect of parenthood.
When your bundle of joy spits in the eye of sleep – all you can do is stock up on coffee and hope that everyone is right; ‘this too shall (bloody well) pass’.
Living on barely any sleep is tough. It can make you forgetful, clumsy, prone to talking rubbish and a lot of the time you will wake up feeling like crap.
In many ways, it is very similar to being drunk. Continue reading
