Eight months and twenty days

It's been three weeks since Alice's palate repair operation, which overall was a less traumatic experience than the previous surgery. Although she had an eight hour wait with nothing to eat before going into theatre, she's at a much more distractable age than she was last time. Similarly, although she was screaming her head off when she came out of the anaesthetic, we did induce her to smile within a few minutes (whereas before she was inconsolably miserable until the next day).

However, we still had a difficult time once we took her home. For a week she wouldn't drink any liquid, either from a bottle or from a cup, so any milk she had was mixed up with baby rice etc and taken off a spoon. She also stopped sleeping straight through for 11 hours at night (yes, I know how lucky we were) and instead refused to settle in her cot at all. We could only get her to sleep by taking her out in the buggy first, and she regularly woke in the night and wouldn't go back to sleep.

When you consider what she went through, two unsettled weeks isn't much to put up with... but my god it felt like a lifetime at the time. It can be quite difficult to see the wood for the trees at the best of times when you're looking after a small baby, but when even the tenuous routine you've established is disrupted you feel like you're never going to feel in control again.

However, here I am. And gradually I am remembering what it's like not to be exhausted.

Eight weeks and four days

Just had a sudden pang while reading a book where a mother with a five week old baby was quoted. Alice will never - never! - be that age again. Already she's passed through so many stages, so many firsts, and she's not been alive two months yet. So even though I'm far from keen to repeat the experience of giving birth just yet, I do now understand why most people have more than one child - the miracle seems to be that they can usually stick at just two or three!

I'm just looking at Alice sleeping and considering again the issue of a 'routine'. I'm torn between letting her dictate when she wants to sleep, when to eat and when to play, and trying to establish some sort of pattern. We're told that babies respond well to routine and find it reassuring, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's really *parents* who need it. I would certainly prefer it if Alice slept peacefully and for long stretches at night, rather than in the day, and I'm worried that I've ruined all our chances of achieving this by not keeping her more wakeful during daylight. But it's a vicious circle - if she and therefore I have been up half the night, I am usually only too grateful for a long sleep in the day for both of us. And in any case, the amount of sleep and spacing of feeds in the day doesn't seem to affect her sleep or feeds at night - the whole thing is entirely random as far as I can tell.

Should I allow the randomness to continue and trust her to find her own routine in time? Or is it time to provide guidance? (I also can't figure out the apparent contradiction between the advice to always 'feed on demand' and the advice to establish a routine. How can we implement 'bedtime' rituals like feed-bath-story-cuddle-cot when we don't know when she'll want her evening feed ?)

Seven weeks

Alice is still far from convinced by her plate. She's managing just about enough of her feeds now, although still fitting in one or two extra bottles a day, but her sleep is very disturbed - she keeps waking herself up at intervals with pitiful little cries, then dropping off again. And of course this plus the more frequent feeds means OUR sleep is still disturbed.

The cleft nurse came to see us today and was able to tell us that it's normal to react badly to the plate, especially if feeding has been well established for a while. We just have to persevere, and the more she wears it the sooner she'll get used to it. But although it's reassuring to know it's normal, it doesn't really help us.

It's funny, although to some extent I do want the health professionals to be reassuring and tell us that Alice is normal and the tiredness is normal etc etc, part of me would like them, just once, to say 'oh my god you poor thing that's TERRIBLE, nobody should have to cope with that, it's just much too hard isn't it?'

It's a fine line between 'normal' and 'yeah yeah tell us something we don't know'.