Sleeping

I write this post slightly bleary eyed and with a certain sense of karma coming round to bite me. Over the weekend, we had managed to get Jake into a reasonable rhythm where he fed at 10pm and then would sleep right through till 4am. Feeling well rested, and not a little smug, we thought that this would be the way of things from now on. Indeed when someone asked me the usual question about sleepless nights I was able to respond that actually he was sleeping well.

Jake apparently had other plans. I think we should have picked up on his warnings yesterday when every time I called Kelsey to see how she was doing, I could hear his cries in the background. He eventually settled down in the evening but when he fed at 8 and fell asleep, we decided to leave it there. The positive is that he did sleep for another 6 hours, but failed to settle down after that. He also didn't each as much as he normally did and lay there at half past 3 cooing and gurgling to himself. Whilst I love Jake immensely, he has trained my brain to wake up when he starts making noise, so I was up with him, trying to work out whether to try and ignore him or to try and cuddle/sing him back to sleep.

This is a recurring issue surrounding Jake and sleep, and I think it's one that there's not a huge amount of advice about. On the one hand, you're told to stimulate your baby and on the other hand you're told that as a new born it's entirely natural for him to sleep the day away. At 6 weeks old, as he is today, it's hard to find any guidance about how much he should be sleeping for. I know that the rational part of my brain says that he'll sleep for as long as he needs, but does that then mean that we should be up with him if he's wide awake at 3am and burbling away?

Up until this point our approach was that if we were in bed sleeping, then he should be sleeping, or at least in his crib ready to sleep. This in theory is to get him used to getting himself to sleep at night, and on the whole it seems to be fairly successful. If he cries in the night, we meet his basic needs of feeding, changing and swaddling and put him straight back down which seems to do the trick. Last night felt like a step backwards and even as I type he sounds like he's waking up after only being down for an hour. Let's hope that this is a blip rather than a new pattern of behaviour.