Sunday, August 28, 2005

Baby whispering

On one of my outings with Baby in the stroller, I went to the library to get some parenting books, since this has become my new reading obsession. Tracy Hogg's Secrets of the Baby Whisperer was fun to read and offers a middle ground between the regime of strict routines at one extreme, and no routine at all at the other.

The idea is to figure out what kind of personality your baby has (angel, textbook, spirited, senstive or grumpybum, and I think ours is a "spirited" baby) and use that knowledge to work out what it is he or she is crying about. Hogg's "routine" is a three-hourly cycle of feeding, activity and sleep. This doesn't yet work with Baby because sometimes she goes from waking to feeding, back to sleeping again. In the evenings, she'll go from feeding to activity, then fussing instead of sleeping, before it's feeding time again.

The last two weeks of broken sleep and unfamiliar work (babycare, that is) are finally taking their toll. I now sport three highly visible zits on my upper lip, am constantly dehydrated, have had tension headaches for the last two days and feel (and look) like I've been up all night drinking.

Four more weeks to go before, maybe, she sleeps through.

1 comment:

Violet said...

Usually, though in the evening it's about 11pm by then.