Bedtime routines, sleep training and all that other shite....

on
🙄
I was given the book 'What to expect when you're expecting' while I was pregnant with the Big Girl (by Himself.....for my birthday....as you may have rightly guessed that went down like a lead balloon! "I'm carrying the baby for nine months, YOU read the effing books!" I may have been slightly hormonal). And like all the 'great' manuals it had sections on pregnancy, birth and everything that comes after. Obviously mammy guilt starts when you're pregnant and I couldn't be seen to be already damaging my unborn child through neglect so the book had to be read......
Of course having read this book I would in turn be the quintessential good mammy and my little red cheeked baby would behave accordingly and we would all live happily ever after! I would be a serene earth mother wearing floaty white clothes all the time, nursing friendly-obviously! Me and himself would be sooo in control and be getting a good 8/9 hours sleep a night. We would wake refreshed every morning and practically fight over who got to get up with our gorgeous little bundle having missed them so much since we had not laid eyes on them or heard a peep from them in 14 hours! Motherhood would come naturally and for every little bump in the road or minor query I could consult my new cure-all miracle handbook!!! We had this parenting lark in the bag.......
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Fast forward to the baby actually being born and Himself and me walking around like two zombies, two zombies who haven't a fecking notion what's going on around them. Keeping the baby alive was about all we could do. Finding it almost impossible to do the most mundane of tasks like getting dressed, showering or making a meal. I shit you not, it was an excellent day in the beginning if any of these tasks were accomplished! 
But people kept telling us 'It gets easier!', so even though we thought they were talking through their arses we had to cling on to that small hope that it would because to be quite fecking frank it couldn't have gotten much worse! 
One key step to 'things getting easier' was establishing a good bedtime routine or so it said in WTEWYE and this can NOT start too early. So like good parents we did what the book said and started our bath-book-bed routine and stuck to it since. The idea being that each step is another step down in activity and leading to winding down and relaxing and eventually to restful sleep. If we did this every night our baby would know the craic and get with the programme. And obviously if we followed this routine to the letter every night the child would always go to bed almost sleeping, so relaxed would she be, there couldn't be any other outcome! The book says it is so!! So we follow that routine every night.
Every. Single. Night.
Including last night....
FML
NB. They were also wrestling each other which unfortunately wasn't caught on camera.

Comments

Post a Comment