The Smell of Little Pong

With a 'grunt, grunt' here...

We had a bad night last night.

Our evenings and nights have taken on a sort of pattern. For the first 3 weeks, we got Theo ready for bed at the same time as Freyja and then he went into the Kari-me sling and slept there until I went to bed at around 10.30pm. I'd then feed him and he'd go into his moses basket by our bed and he generally wakes to feed at around 1.30am and 4.30am. After the 4.30am feed he comes into the bed with us until the morning. This pattern is still happening but he now goes into his moses basket in his cot for the first part of the evening - from about 8pm to 10.30pm.

Mostly it seems to being working well. He does take a long time to feed - usually around 40 minutes, which, with getting up, nappy changing and getting back to sleep again, really eats into that 3 hour period between feeds, but he tends to settle well after his feeds which makes it all a lot easier to cope with.

We have had a couple of bad nights though and they always take the same form. It's usually after the 1.30-ish feed, although it has occasionally been after the 4.30-ish feed, he just won't settle. He lies in his basket and grunts loudly until he eventually starts to cry. I try and settle him with his dummy or with feeding or bringing him into the bed but nothing seems to work. He just keeps grunting and is only really happy when he's latched on (though not really feeding). Last night he woke at 1am and 2 and half hours later I was still trying to settle him. He then got hiccups (something he gets a lot) so I fed him again as this seems to get rid of them and finally he stopped grunting and went back to sleep until 5am. I think it is probably wind/digestion related although when I burp him hardly anything seems to come up, and things certainly seem to be moving okay for him down there.

Then I was having a look through some old emails I had kept from when Freyja was a newborn. And there was one to Adrian moaning about how I hadn't got any sleep because of Freyja's grunting! I had completely forgotten about it but it turns out I used to stick ear plugs in to hide the sound of her grunting - I could still hear when she started to cry but could actually get some sleep in between.

It sounds like an awful thing to do! But I might just dig those earplugs out again if the grunting persists...

posted by solveig @ 11:57 AM