To sleep, perchance to dream...

I know that all parents tend to gloss over the bad parts of child-rearing and like to over-embelish their children's accomplishments. I understand that; what gets me is when I'm trying to solve an issue with our daughter all I find is 'My child's perfect - what's wrong with yours/you?'.

I'm the first to admit that not attending pre-natal classes was perhaps a mistake. However, I was not going to attend a class where it was drilled into parents-to-be that if you did not follow their 'rules', you were a bad parent. I did a lot of research before our daughter was born, both virtual and personal. I read books and talked to moms about potential issues. I was rarely told negative stories, except when it came to delivery stories. For some reason, women seem to love playing the 'one-up' game with this aspect of pregnancy more than anything else.

Our daughter has major sleep issues. She can sleep during the day with virtually no problems. True, she does wake up on occasion, but we can usually get her back down fairly easily. At night, though, we seem to be losing the battle. I don't know what we did - it might be the darkness of her room or a hatred of the blankets we put on her. It's more likely that this sleep problem began when she was 3 days old.

Maddy was born with a not-quite-severe case of jaundice. It was something that was regularly monitored in the hospital, but it never got out of hand while we were in there. In fact, we were kept in an extra day because of it and the issues I was having with breastfeeding (I can't, physically). She also lost a fair bit of weight right off the bat, too - 5% is the norm, 10% is high risk; Maddy rose from 7% to 9% in just a couple of days after coming home from the hospital. I attribute this to the lack of food she was getting - I couldn't breastfeed, but was still trying, as well as supplementing her with formula (5 ml a feeling at that point).

The first Public Health nurse who visited our house the day after I got out of the hospital had a slightly-less-than-perfect bedside manner. I felt like I was being criticized over everything, especially about the breasfeeding. I was on Domperidone to help bring my milk in, but it wasn't working. Maddy had lost almost a pound by the nurse's first visit and their solution was to feed - and wake - her every 2 hours. They wanted me to feed her, even if she was sound asleep, at 7am, 9am, 11am, etc.

I thought it was ridiculous. My mom thought it was ridiculous. Our doctor, when we saw him for Maddy's first checkup 2 weeks later, thought it was ridiculous, but the damage, in my mind, was already done.

Within a week of the first nurse's visit, we had 3 more visits, all by different nurses. I had to go over our story for every single one of them - apparently, they don't read their files (or, in a more conspiracy-theory line of thought, they want to see if they can catch new moms up in their stories to see if they're following orders). Every time, they weighed Maddy, clucked over the lack of weight gain and lectured me on breastfeeding. By this time it was very apparent I wasn't going to be able to, but I, being a stubborn Scot, was determined to keep trying. This lead to massive bouts of stress for both Maddy and I.

We were now up to a 3-hour waking/feeding schedule. I wasn't supposed to let her sleep if it was her time to eat. It would routinely take over an hour to feed her, and by the end of it, she wasn't ready to sleep at all. I was lucky if she would sleep for 30 minutes. We had a lot of rough, rough days in her first month but we made it through. Somehow.

By March, I was at the end of my rope. We bought The Baby Whisperer for help. It did, at first, mainly by pointing out that swaddling was the way to go. I should have known this from the get go, but Maddy certainly didn't enjoy being swaddled in the hospital, so I stopped doing it once we got home. I'm coinvinced now that Maddy's a hot sleeper - she kicks off any blankets we put on her now and hates being hot - and the warmed layers of blankets they swaddled her with in the hospital turned her against swaddling.

The more I read The Baby Whisperer, the more I got confused. I would read ahead to see what we should expect in the next stage of Maddy's life and she'd contradict - at least in my mind - what she'd said previously. I got more and more frustrated with the book and finally stopped using it as a reference when she suggested a very contradictory feeding/napping schedule for when Maddy turned 4 months old.

Instead, I turned to my mom and the internet. I've always found BabyCentre Canada to be the best resource for me. (I've also used Health Canada on a regular basis, too.) I researched sleep issues and behavioural issues to see if there was a solution for us. I know that every baby is different, but with enough parents putting their experiences out there for the world to read, perhaps you can cobble together a few and it matches yours.

Every few weeks, I start my search on possible solutions over again. At this point, today, Maddy's not sleeping through the night. Not even close. I hate hearing about other parents and their wonderful children who sleep straight from 7pm to 7am. I call bullshit on that. I also call bullshit on parents who treat my child's problems as though they were conscious decisions on my part. I'm sure that not every parent is perfect, even if they think they are. I know that portraying yourself as the perfect parent and your child as an angel sent from above is the thing to do, but come on... all you're doing is making people like me, people who are good parents with minor-ish issues, second-guess ourselves and question our parenting.

I've lived in fear for the last 7 months, worrying that someone somewhere is going to take a look at my daughter and her eczema (definitely inherited from both of us) or her cradle cap or find out about her sleep patterns, and call the authorities. I know that we're good parents, she's a very happy baby (very much into blowing raspberries right now) and she's healthy. She eats like a horse and loves to move and play. She climbs and smiles and likes to laugh and has songs she likes and yes, we let her watch TV, but try to keep it to a minimum. She's a good baby. She just has a sleeping problem.