Over the weekend, I decided that since Claire was getting so good at sleeping in her own bed she could be moved into Beatrice’s room, Tom could come back and sleep in our bedroom instead of the spare bed and all would be well.

(If you have a baby at home right now, you probably don’t even need to keep reading this blog post. I’m sure you know where this is going already.)

Evidently I didn’t think this (massive) change through well enough before actually moving beds around, etc. It was one of those days where my options were 1) cut all my hair off with the kitchen scissors or 2) move the beds around upstairs, so changing the entire family’s sleeping arrangements at a moment’s notice seemed like the sensible choice. Tom took the girls out for a morning and I had several hours of very satisfying furniture rearranging, dustbunny eradicating and a general housewifely feeling of power and control.

The first night, Beatrice woke Claire at 8pm by shouting, “I WANT TO READ MORE STORIES!” It’s hard to blame her for not understanding that this is now completely inappropriate behaviour when there is a baby sleeping in your bedroom, because shouting like that was something she did every single other night when we finished reading stories. Why should she have to stop now?

After making several trips back and forth between bedrooms that first night, I decided that if I moved the rocking chair into the girls’ bedroom too then it would be easier to get Claire back to sleep. Of course! The rocking chair will fix this.

The rocking chair didn’t change things one bit. Instead of worrying about waking Tom up with Claire’s middle of the night noise, I worried about waking up Bea. And now my baby who had previously woken once or twice in the night was now waking up five or six times. When I wasn’t to-ing and fro-ing I was constantly feeding her in bed.

Night three was the most disrupted sleep yet.  Now my previously angelic, “sleeps like a baby,” first waking at 4am babe woke up and went back to sleep three times between 10 and 11pm before I gave up and laid down with her in the spare bed in Bea’s room.  I spent several hours being pummelled in the side and head by her feet, then was woken by Bea having a bad dream that Claire was chewing on a toy that was special to her.  There was more to-ing and fro-ing, and I finally got a solid hour of sleep between 8-9am.  UGH.

In case getting a terrible night’s sleep wasn’t bad enough, now Bea is acting up during the daytime again.  Tantrums, shouting and crying, “singing” to Claire (which involves sitting three inches away from her face and shouting nonsense syllables) and all manner of freakout following the consumption of box-juices (aka juiceboxes).  When Claire is having a nap during the day and I have some time to spend one-on-one with Bea she is as good as gold, but as soon as Claire wakes up Bea’s back to being mischevious and emotionally fragile, so I’m quite sure her behaviour is directly related to feeling put out about Claire.  I need to remember that if my bedroom was invaded by someone else against my will and the person I loved best of all was now suddenly in love with someone else as well as me, I’d be cranky too.  But still:  daytimes are one big UGH right now too.

So, night four.  Will it be more of the same?  Slightly better?  Even worse?  Only time will tell, I suppose.  I’m somewhat inclined to move everything back the way it was, but seeing a little table and chair there in the corner of my bedroom, just waiting for me to set up the sewing machine or laptop or serger is kind of intoxicating.  Also, I don’t want all this hassle to be for naught.  Maybe she’s just about to learn how to roll over, and all this nocturnal kicking and waking will subside when she’s over her developmental hurdle.  Yeah, that’s right.  Once she learns how to roll over it’ll all be MUCH better.  Except for the rolling over out of bed part.

Filed under:
Uncategorized by michelle