sleep

Not mine, hers. She is so active and alert, always wants to see and learn about the world around her, and I so love that about her. Curious like her mother :-). But the downside is her not liking to go to sleep. Oh, how she struggles not to go to sleep! Tired and all, she still fights it, like sleep is her enemy (I try and explain to her that sleep is actually one of mums best friends..).

During the day she hardly sleeps (asleep now :-)), but oh the nights.. Well not exactly the nights because she usually (and stressing the 'usually' as last night was an unusuall bad night [probably why she's sleeping now..]) sleeps quite well at night. Ususally she wakes sometime between 3:00 and 5:00, when I nurse her on one side and she goes back to sleep. Then, maybe an hour later again she wakes, so I nurse her on the other side. Third time, if it's still early I try again and nurse her. Sometimes it works, but if not then a bottle and a look at the clock (she usually is down withen two hours later for a morning [and sometimes only] nap). This is from when I discovered I can nurse in bed. Before that, it would be getting out of bed, somtimes trying to nurse, sometimes a bottle, but once we're out of bed, it would take about two hours to get her back to sleep (as opposed to about 20 minutes when nursing in bed, plus I sometimes manage to doze while she sucks).

So it not so much the nights themseleves, but the getting there. As mentioned above, she fights going to sleep. She has a bath at about 21:00, then a bottle of pumped milk and then rocking her and singing to her and walking with her and being nervous at her [which how can your heart not melt when she smiles back at you??] and walking and swinging and singing and rocking and and and.. It will take about an hour and a half (on a good day), two to get her to sleep. 22:30, 23:00 is when she'll finally sleep. But then.. she'll wake every few minutes for another hour or so. These awaknings are easy to handle, as she goes back to sleep quickly, but oh.. getting her down for the night...
Sometimes I'm at wits' end how to get her to sleep because nothing seems to work*. But the only thing that I know will get her to sleep is time. Come eleven o'clock she should be at some stage of sleeping. It is so much easier when you know that you just have to let time pass (though not so easy when holding a ,clearly, very tired baby but who nevertheless fights you!).

I'd love to hear from you mothers how [guess who just woke and who is now typing with two fingers..] you get your little ones to sleep for the night (I don't even try getting her to sleep during the day. If it happens it happens..]. and how you got them to sleep when they were about three months old.

*I do not nurse her to sleep as she will wake the moment I pick her up. I was warned how I shouldn't nurse her to sleep as that will form bad habbits etc. No one ever mentioned I won't be able to do so...
[different when she awakes in the middle of the night, as my breasts then are more a dummy (pacifier) than a milk factory..]