So here we are with a baby!

The most beautiful and charming baby in the world, but a baby nonetheless, with all of the challenges and hopeless despair that go with it.

Bug (Eleanor, but I call her Bug, or her Bugship) is nearly five and a half months old and it's been quite a ride so far but things are beginning to slot into place. Food, sleep, play, development, what I didn't realise is that everything needs to be learnt (by the baby and you). There's no plonking the baby down and assuming she will sleep, at least not after the first couple of weeks. Food can be scorned (rarely by mine) or more frighteningly absorbed with unsatiable gusto (growth spurt? starvation?). I breastfeed and do so exclusively and it can turn into a real marathonic nightmare. Babies do not amuse themselves, want constant cuddling and cannot fall asleep alone. All the clichés of the sobbing exhausted parents are true.

So how are we doing? Better now than at the beginning...

Food. So I breastfeed, thanks to the patience of the midwives at the maternity who time after time showed me how to do it. It's not particularly easy at first but it's been worth it and is now the easiest and most natural thing in the world.

I've been doing it on demand till quite recently and have found that as well as feed Bug, it comforts her and has from day one been a way of calming her down and sending her to sleep. The difficulties have been the fact that for the first three months there are extreme growth spurts and feeding on demand becomes living without a t-shirt, stuck in sitting position with a guzzling baby always crying for more.

 I remember the three and six week ones with real horror. Thankfully I didn't cave in and switch to formula as the constant sucking is actually what makes the breasts produce more food as the baby grows. Bug is now a fat and healthy baby who breastfeeds at day and has a bottled of expressed milk in the evening as part of her bedtime routine (more about the pump later...).  In the last week or so I've added a combo rice/corn/tapioca cereal to her evening bottle, and she has a bit of mashed veg at lunch (carrot and courgette so far) which she loves. I'm lucky that this baby has no food issues apart from wanting to feed all the time, which i am slowly cutting down by having stricter meal times (yeah right). This means:

7AM Breakfast - Breastmilk at source
10.30 Mid-morning snack - Ditto

1PM Lunch - Breastmilk at source and a few teaspoons of mashed veg
4.00 Afternoon tea - Breastmilk at source
6.30 Evening snack - Ditto
8.30-9PM Supper - Bottle of breastmilk with cereal.

OK, I realise this is way too much, she should be on four meals a day but she desn't eat so much at each meal except the night bottle, because...

Sleep. This has been ,and still is to a certain extent, our big challenge. What I didn't realise was how often babies need to sleep. Every couple of hours when they're six months old and more than that when they're smaller (mine should be at about 1h45 at the moment!). For weeks, months, Bug was, unbeknownst to us, exhausted and would just scream and scream for hours driving me insane and all of us desperate. One way of calming her and getting her to sleep was to "titty her up". Let me explain.

For the first four and half months, except for rare occasions in the pushchair or baby-carrier, Bug would only fall asleep mid-feed, on her maternity cushion, on my lap, with a mouth full of nipple which I was sometimes able to slide out without causing her to wake up. And then, if I wanted her to sleep, I was stuck. For day naps I just sat there for an hour or so until my muscles spasmed and she'd wake up, but at night things were complicated. She would fall asleep lying on the cushion which is a long curved thing that wraps around my waist. Once knocked out (code MC - milky coma), I would gently recline and let Gorgeous Chook slide his hands under her, and start to lift her away from me.

Then performing incredible silent acrobatics in slow motion, holding her in exactly the same position she had fallen asleep in, we would glide across the flat to lay the sleeping beauty GENTLY into her cot. Nine times out of ten she would wake up at some point during this delicate procedure and we would be back to square one, having to "titty her up" to get her back to sleep. After a few months of this I decided it was easier to feed her in bed and sleep in sitting position in my own bed, sometimes waking Chook at ungodly hours to settle her (still in silent acrobat style) in her cot next to us. This worked better because she was in super-deep sleep, but not always.

Apart from being uncomfortable and back-deforming (I'm now a hunchback with chronic shoulder pain) it was also incredibly dangerous. SIDS, hellooo? I would wake up in the night, with Eleanor's feet sticking out of the crook in my elbow, her head buried somewhere between my tummy and the cushion. Or disppeared down the side of the cushion. Too much was too much and we decided to try sleep training.

Now, it's important to know that out there online there are websites and forums and blogs and everything dedicated to getting baby to sleep so I have no intention of trying to imitate what is already very well done. If you're really interested try this : how to successfully teach a baby to sleep. It's wonderful. Welcome to the world of CIO, PUPD, NF, BW and all of it.

Basically there are a million ways of getting baby to sleep: from let them cry it out (CIO) alone till they fall asleep, to hugging and cradling and whispering them to sleep, and anything in between.

We went for Ferber which was tough but wonderfully efficient. Ferber was the guy and this was his method: after a bedtime routine full of love and tenderness, checking that baby is fed, dry, tired and loved one leaves the baby to cry to sleep, though with frequent checks that become more few and far between.

We started when Bug was 4 and a half months old, on June 1st. It's not recommended for babies under 4-5 months and we had tried once before but very quickly aborted mission.So after a lovely bedtime routine of bath, change, story, feed, cuddle and night-night, we lay her down and shut the door.

You shut the door and let the baby cry to sleep with only brief checks every so often to reassure her that she's not being left to the wolves. It is absolutely awful as it can take up to an hour so Chook and I would just sit in the other room in silence, nursing triple whiskys and occasionnally whispering hoarsley "is it time to check on her yet?" (no, it's been three minutes). Horrible but efficient. She now conks out after five or ten minutes of slightly high-pitched whingeing. And sleeps till 6.30 usually.

Naps have been less successful; she is resisting and can scream up to an hour so I usually put her down for one nap like that and have another with the old "titty up method" on our bed. Still not ideal but at least nights are free, and one can blog again...