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.

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 curse of maternal insomnia By Kate

You're used to your baby waking you up at various times in the night. It's not exactly fun, but it's one of those aspects of parenthood that most people have to live with at some point or another. The real bummer is when your baby is sleeping like a small log and you're wide awake, wishing someone could rock you back to sleep, offer you a pacifier or stroke your head until you manage to get settled again.

Yep, maternal insomnia sucks. It's definitely worse than being kept awake by a fractious child. It's also surprisingly common, especially when you consider how exhausted and sleep-deprived many mothers of small children are.

Ironically, the insomnia usually hits hardest when the baby is sleeping better. You wake up for no particular reason, then something inside you tells you there's no point in sliding back into unconsciousness because you're bound to be woken by your offspring in a minute. Then another minute passes. Then an hour. Then another hour. And so it goes on.

Inevitably, just as you are on the point of dropping off again, that's the cue for the baby to start wailing. It's as if they know.

Well, I've had enough of it. The maternal insomnia, that is. So I'm doing something about it.

I tried a short course of hypnotherapy and although that helped a bit, it didn't solve the problem.

So now I'm following a self-help book which uses Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to get the insomnia put to bed. I'm in Week Four and after keeping a sleep diary; working on correcting my thinking about sleeplessness; and practicing relaxation techniques, I'm now at the tough part.

For this bit, you have to decide on a daily getting up time, work out what your average amount of sleep was over the last ten days, then go to bed no earlier than that number of hours prior to the morning alarm call. Does that make sense? In my case, I've been getting just over five and three-quarters of an hour of sleep per night, so subtracting that from 07.15, you get 01.30.

Oh, and if you wake in the night, or can't get to sleep when you first lie down, you have to get up again after fifteen minutes of lying awake in bed. You can only go back to bed when you are feeling genuinely sleepy again.

For someone who's fallen asleep no later than 22.00 for the best part of a year, that's a bit scary. But it kind of makes sense. Instead of lying unprofitably doing nothing except feeling narked about being awake, I might as well do something vaguely productive. Like write a blog, for example.

One point to make is I have to make allowances for Rosie. On average, she's awake for just over an hour a night. She also tends to wake earlier than my preferred getting up time - often between 06.00 and 06.30. So I've factored both those things into my calculations, leaving me with a going-to-bed time of 23.15.

Apparently, if after a week you score a 90 per cent snooze rate for your designated kip window (not the official term), you can then lengthen the in bed time by 15 mins and see how you do for another week. Etc.

The aim is to get you to "sleep through". Well, I'm all for that. I'm just aware that the chances of nighttime derailment by Rosie are very high, given that she's never "slept through" in her life thus far.

But if I can at least maximise my sleep around Rosie's nocturnal habits, that at least would be progress for me. As for Rosie's sleep, I'm hardening my resolve to do something radical to get her "sleeping through" the night as well. Just not yet.