See this adorable little creature?

She is driving us all nuts. The combined effect of much travel, much moving, many different places and different sleep arrangements, as well as teething and an ear infection, all in the past three months, has meant that I am making WAY too many excuses for her.

In Darwin, she slept in her own room and was quite a good sleeper until we moved. Since we moved out of our apartment in Darwin in the middle of June, though, she’s had to bunk in with one or the other of us, or just across from my room. So I wake up every time she stirs.

And when she stirs, I’m conscious of her sleeping sister, who I don’t want to wake up also. And so I get up and rock her or, mostly, feed her so that she’ll go back to sleep. It’s about time I stopped it, but I just keep making excuses as to why I won’t start just yet. Most recently, that excuse is that I’m so tired, I don’t have the energy to be up half the night patting her to sleep as she cries in her cot.

Our new house has three bedrooms – two up and one down. I keep going through how we could manage the sleeping arrangements in my head – I would love her to be downstairs so that I can only hear her if she REALLY needs me… But then I think, “Hang on, if she wakes up five times, then I’ll be up and down the stairs all night and I cannot be BOTHERED doing that, thankyouverymuch”.

And so we go back to square one.

This morning she woke for the fourth time overnight at 5.50am, so I got up and desperately tried to feed her so that she’d go back to sleep for another hour or hour and a half. But with our muted noise and the roosters cock-a-doodle-dooing out the window, the Sprog woke up and next thing Harrie got so excited that she bit my boob and I screamed and then the Mr came in said, “I am taking control. Go back to bed and sleep”, and he got up with the girls.

And I didn’t even remind him that I’d put mozzie spray around the doors last night and to make sure that Harrie didn’t touch it.

Quite frankly, the ball of nerves gave up the ghost and I went into blissful sleep for two hours.

This morning when I sat down at my computer, I found the websites the Mr had been searching (we ditched baby books about a month after the Sprog was born).

“How to get an 11 month old to sleep”.

She gets herself off to sleep. She hardly even cries at nap time. She naps well. Her one thing is that she’s a whinger when she wakes up at night. And I’ve let us both get into a habit that I’m not willing to sustain.

So I guess from tonight, we’re sleep training.

Wish us well!