On Sleep

I've said before and I'll say again that the sleep deprivation with a breastfeeding infant hasn't been as difficult as I'd anticipated.

But:

Now that I'm working again, I am pretty exhausted. Even though I'm doing short days, I'm up and down ladders, troweling, etc. Add to that the extra calories burned by breastfeeding, plus the sleep deficit, and it's a bit tougher than when I was on leave.

Also now that Miles is two months old and beginning to show some patterns to his eating and sleeping, I do begin to wonder if I can manipulate them a little bit. I'm fine with breastfeeding on demand, but I wish at times that I could alter his sleep patterns just a smidge.

I'm not into sleep training and I stubbornly refuse to read any books about infant sleep - like I've mentioned before, I can be a wee bit literal & controlling at times and I think if I really attempted to implement some kind of program I'd run the risk of going crazy with it. I would rather continue on with the unpredictable night wakings and let things evolve naturally than get too hung up on schedules.

The issue I have is that Miles is sporadically doing 5 to 6 hour stretches between feedings, which if they land at the right time can be considered "sleeping through the night." But they're still all over the place in terms of when they occur, or if they occur at all in a given day. Last weekend he went from 9:30 pm to 2:30 am and that was awesome but didn't last. On Friday night he went from 5:45 pm to 11:15 pm. That is not so helpful to me because, one, I go to sleep a lot earlier than that so I ended up dozing fitfully on the couch, and two, then he's up every 2-3 hrs for the rest of the night.

Last night he went from 6:45 pm to 12:45 am. Getting closer! I have tried to keep him awake longer in the evening but that seemed counterproductive and didn't work, so now I'm back to letting him do whatever he wants and hoping that the bedtime continues to move up.

I'm still fighting the 4 am wakeup call. I don't know why... it's not like laying in bed listening to him go "eh... eh... eh..." and popping his paci back into his mouth every 3 minutes for another hour is doing anything for my level of fatigue. If I manage to get up and go downstairs I can put him in the swing and get another hour or two of sleep on the couch, but I just don't think clearly at that time of day.

It looks like I'm choking out my child in this photo but I took this when I was attempting to burp a milk-drunk baby in the sitting position with his chin resting in my hand. He was KO'd.