Changing my point of view

While chatting with my chiropractor today during a treatment, we got on the topic of nighttime feedings.  He is a father of two boys and works at Mount Sinai hospital, the largest birthing hospital in Canada.  He sees a lot of very pregnant ladies, who inevitably complain about sleep problems late in their pregnancies.  We discussed human nature, and how he believes the last month before delivery, when you can't sleep, is your body's way of preparing for all those sleepless nights with a newborn.

Only, you can't prepare for sleepless nights.  No matter how much people try and explain what it's like to get up every two hours to feed a tiny baby, you have no idea how hard it is until it happens.

When Cillian came home from the hospital he wasn't latching on to nurse.  Chris and I would set our alarm for that first week, and every two or three hours we would drag ourselves out of bed, Chris would feed Cillian with a tube and I would pump milk for the next feed.  We would put on CP24, or episodes of New Girl or How I Met You Mother from our PVR.  By the end of the first week we were in and out of bed in about 25 minutes.  I would reset the alarm, and we would get up somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours later and start all over again.  It was hard work, but we worked together and our delirium helped us move from feed to feed.  All of it is a blur.

As the weeks wore on, Cillian started sleeping longer and longer stretches, until he would go down at 7:30pm and sleep until 6:00am.  I was so excited that he was sleeping so well, and I thanked my lucky stars for a baby that loved to sleep as much as I did.  And then the gas pains started, and my amazing sleep turned into me suffering from PTSD from waking up to a baby screaming like he was being tortured.  I began to grow angry that my sleep was being disturbed, I was irritable during my middle of the night nursing sessions, and I started to be resentful towards Chris, since he didn't have boobs and couldn't feed Cillian. This middle of the night anger wasn't helping me fall back asleep after I fed, and I would wake up exhausted.

Something had to give. My sister-in-law Katie lent me Mayim Bialik's fascinating book on attachment parenting and I started reading it during the afternoons while Cillian would nap on me after having a snack.  She basically said that she changed her attitude toward nighttime feeds, and everything changed.  She just decided one day to stop being upset, or angry that your baby needed to eat/be soothed/have their diaper changed in the middle of the night, and instead feel honoured that you created this little life, and they sometimes need help getting through the night.  This might sound hokey to you, but to me it made all the sense in the world, and starting that same night I changed my attitude.  I looked forward to Cillian waking up for his first feed of the night, and instead of harbouring anger, I cuddled him as I got our Boppy pillow ready for a nurse.  Two weeks later, if I wake up in the night and Cillian is still asleep, I secretly hope he wants to wake up to feed so I get to spend some quiet time with him.

The moral of this story? I'm not really sure, but I do hope that Cillian will continue to cry out if he needs me, whether it be in the middle of the day, or in the wee, small hours of the morning.

Happy Friday!

Chris and Cillian tube feeding during Cillian's first week at home.