OMeffinG there is a cacophonous racket going on outside our house and my baby is trying to sleep I am trying to get my baby to sleep. I have more or less tolerance for noisy, noisy, noisy Spain depending on the day.
We have car horns bibbing, the ¡frutas! lady shouting her wares, the builders next door banging at something with a hammer and someone ringing on the doorbell. It feels like some sort of cosmic joke and it feels like I want to shoot someone or at least scream at them. BREATHE.
Perhaps my ability to cope is diminished by the fact that last night Bibsey and I had a veeeery baaaaad night. I won’t bore you with all the details but it involved much wakefulness and mythering between 1am and 4.30 am (or at least that is the last time I remember looking at the time). Finally she slept next to me in the bed. The upshot was that we slept like logs until 9am, which sounds lovely but, as I am sure any mothers who may read this will know, you mess with the routine at your peril.
Now in this house we are by no means slaves to a routine. Mr B is a WFHD and I am a SAHM so no-one needs to get out of bed and out of the house to catch a train or drop the kid off – we came to Spain to get away from all that. However, getting up two hours later than usual is bound to unsettle the baby.
Perhaps she is just reacting to my new efforts to move on. I am toying with a little bit of ‘no cry’ sleep training. This kind of night is absolutely the exception and not the rule thank goodness.
The worst part for me was catching site of myself in the mirror last night as I escaped the bedroom for a pee at around 3am. I barely recognised myself. My face was grey and grim. My jaw was clenched, my lips had all but disappeared and my mouth was just a short, thin line. I felt sick with the stress of it. And you can bet that I was transmitting that to her – as very if I needed something to make me feel worse. I had to take a deep breath and gather up all my patience to go back into the bedroom and help my baby to sleep.
Claro, everything was better this morning when I saw her pink smiling face.
So what do you do when you bugger up the routine from the get go? Push everything back a couple of hours? Do you let that knock on to bedtime? What time is lunch for f***s sake?
Today we find ourselves well and truly up the proverbial spout.
image credits: 3:04 am
