Our 'Epic' Baby!

I belong to a few forums etc on Facebook and I had the chance recently to ask what to do if your baby wakes happily chatting to themselves at 5.30am having gone down at 6.30pm??  Emily has done this a few days this past week and I have simply got up and got going with the day.  I mean, why not really.  Thursday was a most productive day because of this :)  But apparently this is still 'night time' and so what you are meant to do is to feed them and put them back to bed and not get up at that time.  Which makes sense actually!  The consultant's comment on Emily being 4 months old and waking for the first time since 6.30pm, was 'your baby is epic to be able to sleep that long with no night feed'.  So there you have it... we have somehow produced this 'epic' baby (at least a lot of the time)!!  Makes up for the unsettled week we had last week, that is for sure.  

I am a morning person so I wasn't too phased by these wake ups, but it makes for the whole day and the routine we are trying at the moment a bit long and complicated.  Funny, since I asked that question, we have had 3 complete sleep through the nights (waking at mostly the right time, 7am yay); and one with a weird 11pm snacklet call.  Epic :)

Up until very recently, I was going with the whole eat-play-sleep-eat-play-sleep etc routine which is suggested for babies.  And you kinda just go with it in terms of timings etc, just watching for your baby's tired signs.  Which, let's face it, is very relaxing, you are not watching the clock too much and are generally enjoying things.  Nice!  We had been doing that since 10 weeks; we tried a sort of routine at around 6 weeks, but I don't think I did it right/didn't really have a clue come to think of it now, and we must have drifted a bit between week 6 and 10.  However, I rang Plunket to chat to them about the routine and how to move to a more structured routine - just to get a bit of predictability in our days - and who would have thought, I was kinda doing it wrong!  They gave me such great advice, as did my lovely coffee group.

Well, not wrong exactly, but my timeframes were too long in some cases, and too short in other areas.  I was feeding Emily for 30mins each time; and if she played for around 40 mins or so and then only slept for 1 hour, it meant I was feeding her every 2 hours in the day from the start of one feed, to the start of the next.  That's a lot of feeding, and sitting on the couch... Can't blame me for not wanting to starve my child!  I did get through a LOT of DVDs though, hmmmm!  No wonder!  

But apparently she can go for quite a bit longer between feeds, like 3-3.5hours apart. And she should be able to get her quota within 15minutes, yay!  More time for us to do cool stuff!  And she can be awake a lot longer too, like up to 2hours or so.  Shame, when I was putting her back to bed after an hour sometimes!  Poor deprived child!

So we are trying to stretch things a bit so I am not feeding as often or as long, and adding in more play time when she wakes up, before feeding, to help stretch out the whole day to avoid the weird 3.30pm-itis which sometimes can happen if things up till then have been a little too short in some areas (like sleeping!) and then it's a bit of a battle as to how does the rest of the day go, and will she have a tiny nap at all before bedtime otherwise it's a long time awake for her.  But it's a work in progress and she is coping well :) Not too hungry, just sometimes a little tired.  

It's hard work being an epic baby, I tell you!

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Turning 4 months old!