Holding out Hope

Last week was a bad week in terms of Emma’s sleep. Emma, as many of my twitter followers will know, is pretty awful at sleeping. And that’s being generous. On a good night she wakes at least twice. Although more often than not it is three times.

There was one good week many, many months ago when she slept fairly well, even managing all night once. They were happy times. I look back at posts I wrote when she was 18 weeks old and there was some hope that she might be getting better. That hope was short lived.

Last week however we hit a particular low of a few consecutive nights of her waking every two hours. That meant that by the time she was resettled and we were back asleep we were getting, at best, an hours sleep in between wake ups.

It is near impossible to function on that kind of sleep. Tuesday was spent with Damian and I napping at different times and trying to work out what we would do to solve the ‘Emma issue’. Leaving her with a suitcase of clothes was looking promising, but then she was looking quite cute and giggling so we thought we best keep her and give her another chance.

So… cue Damian and I alternating across the week trying to settle her (and ending up co-sleeping with her at various stages) and being convinced something was wrong with her. So… Friday night we got home from our week away and decided we would try some Gaviscon in her feed that we had left over from the early days. I also thought she might be feeling restricted in the grobag so we ditched that and put a blanket over her.

Complete failure. She ended up in bed with us around 10pm and then back in her own room at 2ish, then Damian in with her, in her room at 2:30 until she fell asleep.

So…Saturday night we put her to bed not holding out much hope. At 10ish she woke. We fed her and I could hear her moaning (but not crying) over the monitor until 11pm ish. Then, amazingly, she went off and slept until gone 8am. 8am! We were amazed. And the same last night. She woke earlyish but then slept reasonably well once we resettled her.

I’ve no idea what is different. The only significant thing of note is that she has massively improved on walking the past few days, she has hardly napped in the day (literally a 20 minute nap) and she has markedly reduced her milk intake during the day. I don’t know which of these is the thing that has helped her sleep the past couple of days, but, for now at least, we are holding out hope that she might just have finally turned a corner.

Although I hope she hasn’t, at the tender age of 13 months, decided that day time naps are a thing of the past!