However, over about the last 6 weeks or so, this has been getting more and more unfeasible as he doesn’t pay attention when feeding in public, and, as I am discovering, hasn’t been napping as much as he needs to.

Now don’t get me wrong, I certainly wouldn’t have done the first 4 months with him any differently – I still believe he needed the frequent feeding and the cuddles to get the milk supply sorted / introduce him gently to this scary world – but as I observe my increasingly tired and grumpy baby and get up for the 5th/6th/7th time since I put him to bed, I begin to wish I had introduced a little structure a little earlier.

The catalyst for all of this has been his increasingly fragmented sleeping.  Its killing us all, and as I start to observe Rowans behaviour more closely (watching for sleepiness and overtiredness) I begin to realise that he’s been getting more and more overtired, with crazy shouting and mad hyper bouncing at times.  Before I started paying attention to all this, he was having 2/3 naps a day – but of only around 20 minutes each, which I now realise was nowhere near enough.

This is, I think, rebounding on his eating as I’m finding it hard to know when he is going to be in the right frame of mind to pay attention to his dinner and actually eat something.  We’re baby led weaning, so it requires his active participation, and he needs to be awake and alert for this – which when I try to get him to eat, he seems not to be!

So, we’re trying to change this.  In part I don’t like it as it isn’t what I wanted to do, but I’m not one of these people who makes a decision and sticks to it against anything.  If its not working, we find out what’s wrong and we fix it – even if the change I need to make sticks in my throat.  We will be aiming for 2-3 naps with a duration of at least 2 hours, preferably 3-4, at roughly regular times.  I know we won’t be able to manage this in his (or our) bed all of the time because we both love his activities and for my sanity at least, we’re not giving up all of them, so this will be subject to review once our term-time schedule starts come september.

Its going to be hard to get him to stick to this at first, as he doesn’t seem to know how to nap for a long time (although sometimes we’re lucky) and we’re trying various techniques.  I’m not going to write about these until we’re somewhat further down the line, as we’re in experimentation stage and I don’t know what is going to work yet.

Anyway, wish me luck, its going to be a hard few weeks (or maybe months)