Evenings can be Grimsville - the grownups are frazzled too, after all. Bottling him down seems reasonable; is he all on liquid feeds at the moment? And does he have a preferred time for The Evening Meal? (Every child is different: mine was one of the "5:30 on the dot is best" ones; we could make him hold out until 6:00 but 6:20 and he was cooked and so were we, for the next 24 hours.)
Oh horror, anathema, Bad Parent Card Number 127 in a series of thousands, collect them all! - but if you want to and you're not on exclusive BF, it is possible he's hungry enough to warrant a spoonful or two of cooked and re-pureed oatmeal, or pureed and sieved millet or ditto quinoa, mixed with whatever liquid you're using (formula if that's what he's used to) in the evening. All non-allergenic, and complex carbs + calcium can be very settling.
I know you're inundated with well-meaning people proferring unasked-for advice.
And the truth is that some people just do have babies who sleep solidly for ten or twelve hours in the night, and some don't: for us, we reckoned six unbroken hours was "a night's sleep" and if he went for eight hours, we were ecstatic, and the son is still an instant and early riser, at age ten. he also still needs half an hour of settling-down-in-the-dark time. My SiL has one of each: two daughters, one was a good sleeper, the next one wasn't, and she reckons they'd have stopped at one if the first one had been like the second. :-)
The deal is that whatever you need to do to survive is what needs to happen. Your kiddo will not be off to the shrink at the first opportunity based on your need to sleep. I don't believe in controlled crying, because like you I don't think they should cry without being reassured, but it may be that if he's used to a pattern of behaviour that says "crying leads to extended cuddling" and he doesn't know that what he needs is to actually get to sleep, you might be accidentally not letting him find out that sleep is what he needs rather than an extended cuddle. does that make sense?
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Date: 2011-03-14 03:29 pm (UTC)Oh horror, anathema, Bad Parent Card Number 127 in a series of thousands, collect them all! - but if you want to and you're not on exclusive BF, it is possible he's hungry enough to warrant a spoonful or two of cooked and re-pureed oatmeal, or pureed and sieved millet or ditto quinoa, mixed with whatever liquid you're using (formula if that's what he's used to) in the evening. All non-allergenic, and complex carbs + calcium can be very settling.
I know you're inundated with well-meaning people proferring unasked-for advice.
And the truth is that some people just do have babies who sleep solidly for ten or twelve hours in the night, and some don't: for us, we reckoned six unbroken hours was "a night's sleep" and if he went for eight hours, we were ecstatic, and the son is still an instant and early riser, at age ten. he also still needs half an hour of settling-down-in-the-dark time. My SiL has one of each: two daughters, one was a good sleeper, the next one wasn't, and she reckons they'd have stopped at one if the first one had been like the second. :-)
The deal is that whatever you need to do to survive is what needs to happen. Your kiddo will not be off to the shrink at the first opportunity based on your need to sleep. I don't believe in controlled crying, because like you I don't think they should cry without being reassured, but it may be that if he's used to a pattern of behaviour that says "crying leads to extended cuddling" and he doesn't know that what he needs is to actually get to sleep, you might be accidentally not letting him find out that sleep is what he needs rather than an extended cuddle. does that make sense?
I feel for you, really, I do.