Huge Price to Pay

No, this post is not about some expensive item that we bought on Boxing Day. There was no shopping to be had on Boxing Day, and no sleep for that matter. Yesterday is hands down the most painful day we've had as parents since Nathan was born.

Nathan was colic yesterday.

I usually want to avoid using that term on Nathan, since he usually isn't that bad. But yesterday, it was just one long painful day.

In his defense, Nathan wasn't actually colic, he was over tired. Waaay over tired. He was so tired, he couldn't fall asleep.

It all started early Christmas morning, he didn't sleep so well that night and was awake for a whole hour between 3-4am. Christmas morning we had to get ready for church and it was a Christmas joint service in the main building i.e. we weren't able to sit in the quiet nursery like we usually do for English service. Nathan ended up missing his morning naps and was awake from 8am til 12:45pm when we finally got him down for a nap near the end of service.

Our first mistake, we let him sleep in the car seat for a full four hours that afternoon. We thought since he missed so much sleep in the morning, he needed to sleep longer. In hindsight, that ended up messing up his sleep schedule for the rest of the day.

We brought a playpen and even his sleep sac to Steve's parents for Christmas dinner in the hopes that he would be able to sleep while we were there. Our second mistake was that we put him in the library downstairs where you could pretty much hear everything that's going on in the house. Nathan fought being put to bed hard, and when I finally got him to sleep, he only slept for less than 10 minutes. :( Next time we know to put him upstairs where it is quieter. He didn't end up sleeping until 10pm when we had him in the car seat ready to go home.

His sleep that night continued to be poor. He woke up at 4am and didn't go back to sleep until 5:30am. I was so tired trying to get him to sleep that I had to wake Steve up to take over. When he finally slept, he only slept 42 minutes.

Then the neverending story of sleeplessness began.

Nathan fought loud and hard every time we tried to put him down to nap. And when he finally did out of exhaustion, only napped for 20 minutes only to be up again. He looked so tired and we were all exhuasted but the crying would begin before his head even touched the bed. He was tired enough to nap for an hour at 1pm, but the battles resumed pretty much right afterwards.

Luckily my brother came over yesterday afternoon so at least there were 3 of us trying to get him to sleep. By 6pm, we were exhausted and I took out the swaddle because at this point, I just wanted him to sleep so I could sleep. He slept for an hour, woke up to feed, we did our bedtime routine and put him back in the swaddle.

Nathan then slept 10.5 hours. God answers prayers.

We didn't do our job in guarding Nathan's sleep and we paid a huge price. We resolved to never let this happen again even if that meant changing our own schedules just so he could nap.

I made sure Nathan napped regularly today and thankfully was able to get him to sleep back in his sleep sac with very little cry or fight. We started our sleep routine a little earlier tonight at 6:30pm so he could catch up on sleep. No fighting and almost no crying, he fell asleep at 7pm. He did wake up 30 min. later when the sleep sheep stopped (lesson learned: turn down the volume in the evening) but I was able to soothe him back to sleep within 2-3 minutes.

Whew.

I'm glad you're back to your happy self again Nathan in time for your 100 Day Birthday! We'll have cake tomorrow because sleep is more important than cake.