Life with baby

It's hard keeping this up to date. The child is using all my spare time. Well, all the time I'm not a work, paying bills, phoning utilities and councils to complain about things, etc etc.

She's 6 weeks old today. She's been practicing her smiles for a bit over a week now. It's the best way to completely stop me in my tracks – just pretend to grin. I'm sure they're not real smiles yet (called social smiles by baby books), but just her way to test out smiling before she actually means it. L said that she giggled in her sleep today, but I missed that.

The biggest problem is that she does not like being still in someone's arms. I have to bounce or walk or something to keep her from melting down or complaining. It means she hates it when I sit down at the computer. Almost all social networking I do these days is via the phone. But I'm not the sort who can compose blogs on the phone. Mostly the lack of spellchecker gets in the way (and yes, I know Windows Phone has a spell checker).

She's started to (more and more) be able to sleep in a cot. Which means I can do things without having to hold her, and at the same time that L does other things.

Which brings me to a story…

The night we first got home from hospital. We start preparing the child and ourselves for bed. We'd done loads of research on what to do about beds for newborns. Our investigation lead us to this cot that attaches to the bed. So it's open on the bed side, and walled on the other sides. So it's like co-sleeping, but without any risk of squishing the child, since she's in her own space. But there's easy access for feeding, etc.

We prepared the cot with the right sort of mattress, sheets, a cloth to go under her head to soak up the goo that comes out her mouth. We tuck her in with feet squarely at the foot of the bed so she can't suffocate under the covers. We tuck her in tightly so, again, she does not die. Everything we read in the books.

She screams. And screams. And Does Not Stop. This is the first time she's really done this since her screams after she was born.

We take her out, and she calms down. I look at L and she looks at me. We had no plan B. Nothing we read prepared us for and the baby might not be able to sleep in a cot – we just stood there, dumbfounded, with a child, wondering what the hell we could possibly do.

In the end, we slept with her in the bed. Either on one of our chests, or on the bed between us. We took shifts being awake, watching to make sure she was alright, and slowly going the road to chronic sleep deprivation.

She still won't sleep in the cot by the bed. No matter how we try. But we have another cot for the living room, where she will sleep during the day (of course, if we take it to the bedroom, she'll just scream in it and no sleep). And that's where she is now.