A Milestone?

Well here we are at the six week mark. Kathleen is growing big and healthy and now weighs 4.3kg. She is no longer considered a newborn and has been discharged from the midwife's care. By far the biggest issue we have had with Kat over the past few weeks is with her not sleeping and being overtired, and as a result crying and screaming all evening.

Everyone has said to us that the first six weeks are the hardest (and they have indeed been very hard), but what does that mean?
* Is a sudden change going to come over Kathleen today?
* Or am I just going to become used to being a parent?
* Or is my brain going to implode in on itself?
A bit of all three I think......

* A big change did come over Kathleen recently. All of a sudden her eyes came into focus and she was able to see and react to things and people. We have been getting some of the biggest smiles from her now. And she has started making the cutest little baby noises :-) It is great to see her responding to you when you talk to her.

* Being a parent is a lot more difficult than I expected. When they say it's a 24x7 job I didn't realise that meant feeding and rocking and carrying and cuddling and pram pushing 24x7. Literally! Apart from the hours between 11pm-approx 7am when she is sleeping (although she will wake up once during this time for a feed). Who needs the gym!

Kat's sleeping problems came to a head a couple of weeks ago when we had several days in a row of her screaming continuously all evening. She was so over-tired but was so worked up she could not sleep, and nothing seemed to calm her down. Our grocery list that week consisted of only two things - Panadol and Whiskey! I sought help from Plunket and have also enrolled in a class at North Shore Hospital (more to meet other mothers than anything else). Both of these have been an enormous help to us and we have learnt some strategies to cope with Kat's sleeping issues.

The first lesson was learning to recognise Kat's tired signals, and to start winding her down and putting her to bed as soon as they appear. She is a social baby who wants to take everything in, with the result that she becomes over-stimulated very quickly. One of the keys is to remove the stimulation before it gets too much.

Lesson two is to be consistent and have a routine for putting her to bed so that she learns when it is time to sleep. I.e. swaddle, cuddle and sleep. Eventually we want to get to the point where she can fall asleep in bed by herself once she is drowsy, but for now we are just trying to teach her to fall asleep. This means rocking her until she falls asleep. It can take a week or more for a new thing to become learned so it will be a long process.

The third lesson was to be persistent in what we do and not give up after five minutes if something isn't working. She's not going to fall asleep instantly just because she's tired - I don't, so why should I expect her to. So that means rocking her for five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever it takes until she dozes off.

The frustrating part is when 15 minutes becomes 30 minutes and 30 minutes becomes an hour and she still hasn't slept. And then she's starting to get hungry again and I still haven't gotten done the things I wanted to do an hour ago because I've been rocking her to sleep (things like having lunch or going to the toilet). And then I know that if I feed her it will be at least another hour before I will have the chance to do those things. The hours in the day go by very quickly - but the minutes drag!

* And having said that, yes some days I think I am going to go insane.

Here are some links to some recent videos of Kat, showing her dual personalities:
Angel Baby.mov
Devil Baby.mov

Now don't get the wrong impression, Kat's not screaming because she's alone on the changing table. She was doing that before she got put down for the video and continued after she got picked back up again as well.

-Megz

PS: As an update to the last post, I have to take back what I said about Kat disliking having her nappy changed. She now loves it because she can look around at everything and there is SO much for her to look at. Her eyes get so wide these days just taking everything in, all the time!