Diary of a New Dad

Cutting out a night feed

Wake to sleep - a principle advocated by The Baby Whisperer. It states that to help you young child cut out a night feed, you should go in about 10 minutes before he would normally wake and rouse him a little.

This brings him out of a deep sleep and puts him in a new sleep cycle. This should take only 5 minutes, and after 3 nights the feed should be a distant memory.

In theory.

In practice, we went in there at 1am, we nudged him, as suggested. We put the dummy in his mouth, as suggested. He woke up a little, and started to go off to sleep again.

Then it happened, my alarm, positioned 6 inches from his head, went off again (as it was on snooze).

Any chance of getting him back to sleep straight out the window. But don’t worry, the book comes with suggestions as what to do. Give him boiled water to soothe, this worked for all of 5 minutes until he realized it was not milk.

Long and short of it, what was meant to be 5 minutes ended up in me getting back into bed at 2:10am, very tired.

Welcome to the real world

Well, where to begin…

I’m currently watching Ryder in his cot as he falls asleep. You see we’re trying to implement an independant sleep routine. I have the next week off work, so it seems like a good time to do it.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

The past 7 weeks have been an absolute rollercoaster of a journey. I don’t really know where to begin.

I can’t say honestly that I felt ready to be a dad, and I can’t say that even now it is easy. But it is fantastic.

We have had some great times so far, like recently he started to smile. (see attached photo) When he started to react back to us it all becomes worth it. He can scream blue murder for an hour, then give you a grin that melts your heart, and you suddenly forget the last hour.

There have also been bad times, mainly when he refuses to sleep. Being a computer programmer, I like things logical. Babies are not. When he gets tired, if you don’t get him down quickly then he gets over-tired. When babies get over-tired they get hyperactive a cannot sleep. This would be a bad time.

I hope to keep this updated more often now, but only time will tell.