First classes - by Theo

While not quite as swift as the CELTA, which had us teaching on the very first day, the Bristol PGCE course does whip us into classrooms pretty quickly, and today I taught my first full lessons to a Year 7 class & a Year 8 one.

Rosie obviously knew something was up. She must have caught the general buzz of excitement and anticipation, and was clearly thrilled for me. So much so that she felt she had to wake up at 1 am to let me know just how excited she was. And then again at 2 am. And again at 4.30 am. So, thanks to my darling daughter's enthusiasm for my fledgling secondary school career, I went into school on about 3 hours sleep.

Great.

The first class, the Year 7s, were third period after break. Having been in the school for nearly three weeks now they've got to know me a bit. I've been observing in their classes across the curriculum and had helped out in their class earlier in the week delivering sections of the lesson. So I figured it would go OK. And I guess it did. It was no shining triumph, but no disaster either. The class looked at the construction of character through dialogue in Skellig, particularly through the use of types of questions. The problem was that I was too ambitious in what I was trying to teach them and, being a mixed ability class, this meant that some of them were very confused by the end. I hope this won't have put them off - classroom management is a lot about the students trusting you and the activities you set. Too many activities which they just don't get and I'll lose that trust.

Year 8. Period 5. The tiredness was starting to bite. We were looking at Holes by Louis Sachar, and I had another ambitious lesson planned involving identifying literary devices (alliteration, onomatopoeia, etc), creative writing and textual comparisons. All in an hour during the last lesson of the day with a class who had become convinced I was stalking them. I threw myself at it. It felt great. We whizzed along taking nearly everyone with us, and many of the students going way beyond what I'd hoped for. We were flying, ahead of time. A couple of students, who through laziness rather than lack of comprehension had barely written a word, could have perhaps done with more time, but with ten minutes to go we'd basically finished what I'd planned. So we quickly whipped out the book and read through another chapter before the bell went and the adrenaline faded. Phew. What a high.

Afterwards my tutor commented that she felt the ending lacked a little something. It needed a chance for the students to talk about what they'd learned. That's when I turned over my four-page long lesson plan to realise I'd left out half of my final activity, which would have done exactly that.

Bugger.

You live, you learn. At least that's what I hope my students will do.

The Battle of Sleepy Corner IV By Kate

Rosie hit that golden milestone of "sleeping through" the night at the age of thirteen months. Hoorah, I thought, we're there at last and I don't have to bother with control crying or anything upsetting like that to transform my formerly wakeful baby into a Good Sleeper.

Wrong. Of course.
Rosie continued to sleep through the night from that moment on....but only intermittently. Theo and I would have four or five uninterrupted nights followed by two or three night wakings then a quiet night then a fragmented one....and so it went. Rosie seldom woke more than once when she did wake in the night, but those wakings could last a gruelling two and half hours if we were really unlucky.

Eventually it got to the point when my resolve hardened. In Madrid, I'd been able to keep Theo relatively insulated from the night time shenanigans, but back in the UK, Rosie's bedroom is opposite ours and there's no escape. Now, a wakeful Rosie and a sleep-deprived me was something to which I had become accustomed, but living with a sleep-deprived Theo is insupportable. Something had to be done.

By eighteen months, both Theo and myself, while not enjoying the sound of our small daughter howling her eyes out about something or other, had also become reasonably inured to it. So we were ready to toughen up our stance on overnight waking.

Our plan was simple: I would offer no more comfort breast feeds (in any case, they had lost their effectiveness at getting Rosie back to sleep) or early morning snuggly breast feeds in our bed to buy us more time before having to get up. In fact, I would no longer tend to Rosie's overnight needs at all - Theo would take charge of resettling her until she had got the message that parental attention would be kindly but fleeting during the night. Rosie had to learn to roll over and get herself back to sleep.

So that's what we did. The first night involved about an hour and a half of on/off protesting on Rosie's part, with Theo making frequent trips into her room to soothe her, but at lengthening intervals. The next night she slept through. Since then, we've had maybe two or three other occasions when Rosie's needed attention overnight (including when she was in the throes of a cold) but otherwise, I'm happy to report - and with the minimum of angst - she is now generally sleeping through. And waking up later in the morning too, which is an unexpected bonus.

As a former post outlines, I have now ceased to offer the bedtime breastfeed as well and that change has also been accepted by Rosie without too much complaint. The need for subterfuge has thankfully passed and instead of pretending to leave the house at bedtime, I simply give Rosie a kiss good night and leave Theo to put her in her cot.

It all seems so simple and a non-parent would be forgiven for asking why it's such a big deal. All I can say in reply is after more than a year and a half of interrupted and foreshortened sleep the feeling of freshness and good humour that accompanies a half-decent bit of snooze cannot be understated. It really can't. Amen.

Brain malfunction

I knew I had reached a new point of tiredness when I tried to open the front door with my travel pass. While it's wonderful to have friends to visit, it isn't half knackering, especially when a certain little girl doesn't understand the concept of a post night-out lie-in.


So after three nights of being sociable with our lovely visitors Harry, Ayesha and Onno (who, in all truthfulness, probably didn't need my company in the evenings!) and then being woken at 6.30 each morning by my darling daughter I was all over the shop today. Wrong textbooks in classes, dodgy grammar explanations (ok, so that's par for the course) and pouring tea on my cereal. I guess now I know how Kate has felt for the past 16 months!

The Late Pass By Kate

The time: 20.15. The place: Madrid. The situation: I was on my way to a gig. I was going on A Night Out. This deserves capital letters because it was the first time I had ventured into the realm of night time entertainment beyond my own front door since Rosie was born more than fourteen months ago.

It wasn't the first opportunity I'd had, but it was the first I had taken up. Because of Rosie's unpredictable sleep patterns and her previous resistance to resettling without a breastfeed, I had always been too reluctant to be out of reach. Also, if I'm honest, there was probably an element of PFB (Precious First Born) there. I think most parents become more blase about leaving their offspring in the care of someone else as they produce more children. But I'm still inexperienced in these matters. Oh, and did I mention generally feeling too knackered to go on nights out?

But Rosie sleeps through more than she doesn't nowadays and Theo has become more adept at resettling her if she wakes up and I've become less neurotic about letting him, so time to step over the threshold and launch myself into the grown-up world of night-time leisure activities.
Except in Spain, it isn't a grown-up world - not until after midnight, anyway. As I walked to catch the Metro I observed numerous wide-awake babies and toddlers out socialising with their parents. By this time, Rosie had been asleep for nearly an hour. Brits like to get their children to bed early, Latinos don't worry about that so much. Their children either sleep later in the morning, sleep more during the day or learn to live with less sleep.

So I watched Anika perform their set at La Casa Encendida, beer in one hand, camera in the other. My friend Rasha was doing some session work with Anika and had kindly added me to the guest list. She had also added Theo, but he had elected to remain at home in charge of Rosie so I could have the late pass.I enjoyed the gig, but being reunited with Rasha was even better. She was an appreciative consumer of some of Madrid's main sights as we walked through Sol and Plaza Mayor on our way to the legendary Chocolateria San Gines, where we continued the business of catching up with each other's news over cups of thick chocolate accompanied by a pile of churros.

By Madrid standards, the evening was over very early. Rasha had had a late night followed by an early start so was more than happy to get some sleep and my body clock is used to being out for the count by eleven, so we were home and tucked up into our respective beds before 01.00.

Many Madrilenos would have only just been heading out the door to meet their friends at that point, but I'm a Brit and a mother of an intermittently-sleeping one year-old so feel I can claim light weightedness with no attendant sense of shame.

It was fun, though.

The Battle of Sleepy Corner III By Kate

More than eight months have passed since I last had an unbroken night's sleep. Actually, that's inaccurate. Given my bladder's propensity to require emptying at some point overnight (especially during pregnancy) I can't actually remember the last time I had an unbroken night's sleep. No, a total of around seven hours (with a minimum 4-hour stretch included) is the elusive - but vaguely realistic - dream I've been chasing. So is there dark at the end of the tunnel?

The answer is a cautious "possibly". After several months of Rosie managing little more than two hours of sleep before waking up and calling for me, something had to give. Her wakefulness (and therefore mine) was getting worse and her ability to resettle without part of my anatomy clamped between her lips (specifically, a nipple) was non-existent.

I decided she would have to learn to nod off without my assistance. So I tried the gentle ways of encouraging sleep sans breast: patting her tummy gently and saying "shh..."; picking her up to soothe her then putting her down again (and repeat ad infinitum); gently unlatching her after she had finished feeding but before she had fallen entirely asleep and putting her down.... and it all made her worse. Angry and distressed to the point of hysterical. Of course, the moment I put her to the breast, she would calm down. But then we were back to Square One.

So I took a deep breath and put Rosie down to sleep after her bedtime feed, kissed her goodnight and left her to it. I listened outside the bedroom door as she wailed in protest, poised to go in the moment her cries sounded like they were becoming truly distressed instead of frankly frustrated. They didn't. Instead, they became increasingly intermittent and after 25 minutes, she was asleep. She woke again a few hours later and again I waited to hear if she would get seriously upset. She didn't and once again, fell back to sleep. The third time she awoke, she didn't make any noise, just fidgeted a little, then fell asleep again. The fourth time she fidgeted for a long time, then fell asleep. By the fifth time it was almost 6am and my milk-engorged breasts felt like a pair of rocks strapped to my chest. This time I fed her and at the end of the feed she allowed me to put her back down for more sleep without protest. This was progress indeed!

The next night followed a similar pattern.

On the third night, I put her down to sleep at bedtime and left the room. Ten minutes later I asked Theo if he could hear anything. He replied in the negative, confirming my suspicions. She had fallen asleep without a murmur.

Three weeks later, it's rare Rosie makes any kind of a protest at bedtime. Even if she's wide awake, she's generally able to get herself off to sleep without Mummy (or specifically, Mummy's breasts) being involved. And it's had a huge impact on her overnight wakings. In general, twice a night now, instead of a minimum of five.

Not only that, but Rosie has now been moved into a cot (after co-sleeping with us since birth) - a change she took with equanimity - and then into her own room, so Theo and I would no longer disturb her with our fidgeting/snoring during the night. Rosie's sleep pattern has remained the same - not perfect, but a hell of a lot better than it was. As for me, I can't sleep because I'm finding it strange not to be able to hear and feel my baby sleeping (or not) beside me. But even that's improving.

So why have her naps gone to pot? Half an hour is the most she can manage in a static situation.

In answer, we've had to resort to The Magical Sleepy Pavement. It seems the only way Rosie will stay asleep for longer than thirty minutes at a time is if the wheels of her pram are thrumming the ribbed paving of our barrio. So now Theo and I take turns to slowly walk the streets while our offspring takes her siesta.
On the plus side, the weather is still good here and it's a fine way to get out of the flat and have a little gentle exercise. I just don't want to think about the onset of winter.

The Battle of Sleepy Corner II By Kate

It seems it's a culturally specific thing to expect (and need) an unbroken sleep overnight totalling around eight hours. And that infants are expected to sleep unbroken for around 12 hours (or more) - often alone in their own rooms. Societies without these kind of expectations don't tend to report as many "baby sleep problems" as a result. Such problems, it seems, are more related to parental expectations. Which is all kind of reassuring, although it doesn't make me feel less knackered after yet another night of Rosie's multiple awakenings.

On the plus side, Rosie isn't a big cryer on the whole (fusser, yes) and whimpers rather than shouts when she wakes up. More often than not, she goes back to sleep fairly quickly once she's had a feed (or a comfort suck, or a modest libation, or a quick thirst-quencher). She mainly sleeps from around 7pm (give or take half an hour) until 0700 (ditto) - waking up at intervals that vary from up to 5 hours in the first part of the night (very rare, it's usually 3 or so) followed by every 45 mins - 2 hours, usually diminishing as the night moves into morning. She also fidgets a lot, which tends to indicate that she's either a) about to wake up or b) isn't getting back to sleep as easily as she (I) would like. On these occasions, combinations of dummy-tapping and tummy-patting usually help her relax, but it can take a while. I would love to learn how to do those things while still asleep - but it takes skill that I don't possess. Mind you, I have fallen asleep with my hand resting on Rosie's tummy once or twice. It's not that comfortable, even though she sleeps beside me in her baby nest. The blood has a tendency to drain down my arm, which is inconvenient.

So the negative side is that Rosie wakes up a minimum of 5 times a night and she is generally a lot faster at getting back to sleep than I am, so 5 hours of fragmented sleep (having retired by 9pm) is usually the most I can hope for.

Actually, I've discovered it's perfectly possible to function on that kind of sleep. After ten days of insomnia when I was getting perhaps 2 hours of broken sleep, I now consider 5 hours to be a fairly decent amount.

So what's to be done? Rosie has a bed-time routine and she naps okay during the day generally. She's breast-fed on demand and even when it's not a feed she particularly needs when she wakes up, it's still generally the fastest way to get her nodding off again. Experiments of not offering her milk and fobbing her off with a dummy have proved disastrous, so I'm inclined to go with the line of least resistance for now.

When will it change? Who knows. Some babies obligingly sleep through the night when they're only a few weeks old. Others do so to start with, then throw a curve ball at their pleased (smug) parents by ditching that habit in favour of waking up loads when they get a bit older. One theory is that babies tend to sleep through when they hit a certain weight (11lb, 13lb and 14lb have all been quoted to me) another is that they do so when they get to a certain age (6 months), yet another is when they start on solid food. All of these (apart from 11lb) are milestones Rosie has yet to reach. However, call me pessimistic, but I suspect Rosie will sleep for longer stretches in her own good time and I would be (very pleasantly) surprised if it's anytime soon.

Meantime, I've been ignoring the advice to sleep when Rosie sleeps during the day. Mostly I can't do it anyway and lay there feeling more stressed about the issue than I otherwise would. Instead I try and do something vaguely useful - some writing, or a bit of housework (the few bits Theo hasn't done). I actually feel better if I've achieved something for myself than if I'd managed a power nap. And I tell myself that when Rosie's bigger I will look back at this sleepless period and wonder at how quickly it passed. And finally, I remind myself that my sleep deprivation is not only shared by countless other parents, but it's also culturally specific. So that's okay, then.