Save My Sleep...... please!!!

Things are going well in the Robertson house at the moment in regards to the children....  we are adjusting to life as parents of 2 kids under 2 quite well.  Mackenna is such a good kid (well most of the time anyways, as any child does, she can test our patience when she wants to!) and not much really bothers her, so we have been very lucky in that respect.  She just takes pretty much everything how it comes and is happy to go along with the flow, which has really helped us with introducing Piper into our little piece of the world. 

Piper, who is now 10 weeks old, is starting to adjust to life 'on the outside' and is starting to become a lot more predictable, which is great!  It makes planning things, even simple things like trips to the shops or to visit friends or family (something we haven't done a lot of since she was born) a bit easier.  In her first couple of weeks, I would get really disappointed when plans I made would end up falling in a heap at my feet and just eventually decided not to make plans, with the exception of visits to the chemist for weekly weigh-ins (...for Piper that is...  it's like The Biggest Loser in reverse...  this week I was gunning for over 5kgs, but we didn't quite get there (4.89kgs) so that's the goal for next week... LOL!) Even that would take a whole morning of planning feeds and sleep times etc. and working it around Mackenna's swimming lessons, which of course, falls right in the middle of the 4 hours on the one day of the week that our Baby Nurse works, to make sure that by the end of it all, I had 2 happy children who are fed and rested! 

I would love to freeze time right now and keep both of my girls exactly the age they are...  every second Mackenna spends awake she is brightening our days, just by being her.  She has such an innocent and honest view of the world and it really puts things into perspective at just how simple life should be.  Piper is just so cute and tiny and precious and is growing up so fast, that our little newborn is going to be a toddler before we know it and this tiny little bundle that I love cuddling up to numerous times a day isn't going to want big cuddles, cause it will be more fun to be chasing after and getting into mischief with her big sister!

But, as human nature is these days, I am not completely happy and there is one thing that I really wish I could change....  Piper's night time sleeping habits.  Not that I should complain, a lot of people would probably say that I am lucky she sleeps the way that she does, and we have been very spoilt with Mackenna, who was sleeping for 7 - 8hrs per night at 10 weeks and has only had maybe 5 'broken sleep' nights since then, all associated to teething.  I should probably rephrase this to, I should change my own sleeping habits, but I'm kind of not prepared to do that, because it would mean I would miss out on time to do the basic housework, computer time and just time to myself and with Todd. 

Mackenna goes to bed between 7:30 and 8pm and normally goes without too much fuss... she can sometimes be awake in her cot for up to an hour before going off to sleep, but she knows that it's bedtime and is happy to be in her cot with her teddy's (she is up to sleeping with 3 at the moment!) She sleeps through until anywhere between 7 and 8:30am the next morning without a peep.  As I said, we have been very spoilt with this little girl! 

I try and time Piper's 'bedtime feed' for between 8 - 9pm and she goes straight off to bed afterwards.  I try and keep her awake from her 'dinner feed' at 4 -5pm until bedtime, so that she has a good reason to sleep for a long time (and because she has a long afternoon sleep before that dinner feed) but she will often have a half hour nap somewhere in between, which at the moment, works well, because it takes the edge off her getting too grumpy from being awake for too long and overtired.  She sleeps through until about 12:30 - 1am, when sometimes I am 'waking her up' (which doesn't actually involve Piper even opening her eyes... she will skull a whole bottle while still asleep and stay asleep, which is good, but it does make winding her difficult) and sometimes she wakes up herself (usually at about the same time I am just about to wake her up!)  I give her a bottle of expressed milk at this time, so that I know that she is getting a big feed before what I want to be her longest stretch of sleep.  This approach worked really well for getting Mackenna to sleep through quite early and to me, just kind of makes sense.  Milk supplies can generally be low at night too, so I want to make sure she is getting a full feed (although, the amount I am able to express in lieu of her having the feed makes me feel confident that there is no problem at all with supply!) 

We used to give Mackenna a dose of colic drops with this feed too, at first because she needed them but later on because they helped to get the burps up and her settled and asleep quicker (so basically as a sedative!)  She didn't mind having them at all and in the end, would be waiting for them once her feed had finished.  She stopped having them every night at about 4 months (we use Brauer's, so a natural product without the 'addictive properties' of some of the others.  She had no problems at all when we stopped giving them to her.)  Piper, however, acts as though you have just squeezed a rotten lemon in her mouth when you give them to her and spits half of it out, so I only give them to her if she is having real trouble with getting wind up and is really visibly uncomfortable.  She is normally good with wind...  she only cries if it is really uncomfortable and I know that it's not far from coming up.  Normally she just squirms and grunts until it comes up and she normally gets most of it up pretty easily, within about 5 minutes of finishing the feed.  She does fart a lot too, most of the time without too much fuss (except for some decent grunting sometimes!) so she is able to pass whatever she doesn't burp up through her digestive system pretty well.  Every now and then, a bubble in her tummy will disrupt her from her sleep but she is fine once we pick her up and she is able to burp it up.

Piper has been blowing me away with how much she has been drinking.  We started off with small amounts (ie. 50 - 60mls) and worked out in a real hurry that amount wasn't going to be even close to being enough!  She would skull that much in no time and then be really upset that she was still hungry.  I generally take the amount I can express as a good indication of how much she is drinking (given that I'll only make what she takes etc. etc....) so we went up to between 90 - 110mls which seemed to be a good amount for a few weeks.  In the past few days, or week or so, she has been drinking that easily and because she is still hungry, draining one side as well (which means I have no idea how much she is getting but I would say between 40 - 70mls on top of the bottle!)  It's hard to try and predict... expressed breast milk is like gold and you don't want to overestimate too much and end up having to tip what could have been the whole next feed down the sink.  I don't mind feeding her the extra, but I do like to be able to express her whole next night's feed at this time, so I don't want her draining me because what was in the bottle wasn't enough.  I also want to be confident that we have the amount right if Todd stays up to feed her (she isn't very friendly if it gets to having to defrost and heat up more milk!)  I'm not sure if the extra sucking is a comfort thing, but she is drinking vigorously enough that she is sucking for food and not just for the comfort.  There is also nothing left to express, so she is definitely drinking it (and she doesn't generally spit up or vomit much, so it's going somewhere!) 

She settles pretty easily after this feed and on a good night, is asleep and back in bed within half an hour.  A good night means no poos (I don't change her nappy with this feed unless there has been a poo...  too much stimulation and it's too bloody cold at this time of night to be getting her half naked and wiping her bum with a cold, wet wipe!), burps coming up quickly and easily and a decent amount of 'awake time' earlier in the afternoon/early evening.  A 'bad' night normally has her up for about an hour or so.  I give her this feed on the couch with the TV turned down so low that I can barely hear it and most of the lights off (I leave one on that gives me enough light to see what I'm doing and where I'm going) to give her the day/night perception and I put her to bed in our silent and relatively dark bedroom.  I do settle her and put her to bed asleep because I don't want her getting upset and waking everyone up by putting her into bed awake and letting her settle herself (.... which, btw, my week or so of teaching her to self settle has been successful...  we still have some 'protest' grizzling, but she is generally asleep within 10 mins of being put in bed.  Was worth the tears, hers and mine, in the end, because she will now drop off to sleep anywhere if she is tired.)

She is normally asleep and in bed by 1:30 - 2am.... sometimes soundly, sometimes grunting her head off with bubbles in her tummy (all while asleep...  I get her up to try and get the bubbles up, but she ends up going back to sleep, because I put her in a comfy sleeping position where the wind doesn't bother her!)  I then do the few things I have to do and get into bed about 15 mins later.

I always go to bed thinking about what time she 'should' be waking up...  just so that I don't get too frustrated if it seems really early when I look at the clock when I'm dragging myself out of bed, but is a reasonable time for her to be waking up (ie. at least 4 hours after she had the last feed)...  kind of setting the expectation for myself.  I always have a 'desired' time in mind, which is usually somewhere in the 6's, but know that in reality it will probably be somewhere in the 5's....  for a few days there, she was consistently waking up at 5:05am.... so while I was ok that it was at least 5am, I would have loved her just that little bit more if it was 5:45am ;)  I am absolutely stoked all day if she sleeps through until after 6am (.... the things that make a Mum of a newborn 'over the moon' happy....LOL!)

I don't mind her waking up between 5:30 and 6:30am, it means I don't have to rush her before Mackenna wakes up.  She generally has a nice quiet feed and goes straight back to sleep again, which I put her in her swing for and she sleeps soundly until about 9 - 9:30am.  I normally stay up after this, but if I am still feeling really tired, I will go back to sleep on the couch or Todd will get up and sit with her while I go back to bed for a few hours.  I don't like going back to sleep because I am generally wide awake by the time I'm finished feeding and changing her and it makes getting up again in a few hours so, so, so hard!  When your body is craving a 12 hour stretch of solid, undisrupted sleep and you tease it with 2 and 3 hour stretches, it is honestly like being tortured!!  I seem to cope better if I have just one 2 or 3 hour stretch a night, rather than 6 hours with an hour of awake time in the middle!

So, as I said, I can't really complain about her sleeping...  she is very consistent and does sleep well.  The timing is kind of good, but not at the same time.  I have fallen into feeding her at 12:30pm or so, because that is when I have found myself being finished doing all the things that I want to do after the kids are both in bed and while she is soundly sleeping, I figure it best to leave her sleeping and keep doing the things I need to do.  I could go to bed earlier, after I put her in bed, but that means I'd have no time for myself or my husband at all and would mean that my sleep would be broken right in the middle of the night anyway.  I also really can't go to bed earlier than 9:30pm....  I don't know why, it just doesn't feel right at all!!  I'm kind of scared of feeding her any earlier too because I don't want her waking up in the 3's or 4's for her morning feed....  I figure that as she starts to sleep for longer, she will just wake up later, meaning I can give her her late night feed (the 'dream feed') earlier (.... makes sense right...?)  I am still deciding whether or not to try giving her this feed earlier just to see if she will sleep through until the same time, because I am really scared of being waken up so early...  I don't do really early, really cold mornings well at all!)

Does anyone have any tips or tricks that they have tried and have worked with getting their bubs to sleep longer at night?  I'm trying all of the advice that I've picked up along the way from different friends, so called experts and my own experiences with Mackenna, but I haven't found what works best for Piper yet.  It honestly could be that she is still just that little bit small to be sleeping for longer periods and she will work it out in her own time and I do fully accept that...... but if there is something I can do to help her, I am very keen to try it!!  It doesn't seem to make any difference if and when during the day she has a bath (at the moment, I bath her every couple of days) or how much 'awake' time she's had during the day before (this just affects how long she is awake for when she has her dream feed!) or if she has a little bit of wind or not.

She has fallen into the following loose day time routine....  which I'm happy to try changes to, if it means she will sleep better through the night, although, her timing does suit Mackenna's food and sleep times and gives us time to go out during Piper's awake times too:

9 - 10am... up from morning sleep and have feed
Around 11am (generally 1 - 1.5hrs after waking)....  put to sleep in cot for half hour nap (no amount of coaxing will see her go back to sleep after this half hour - 45mins of sleep)
1:30 - 2pm (generally about 3.5hrs after last feed)...  feed and put to sleep in cot or bassinet (depending on what Mackenna's doing and if each others 'noise' is likely to wake the other one up.)
4:30 - 5pm....  up from sleep and dinner feed.  Try and stay awake until bedtime, but often has a quick nap in her swing about 6:30 - 7pm)
8 - 9pm (3.5 - 4hrs after last feed): bedtime feed and put to bed awake to self settle