Sweet Dreams and Bedtime Nightmares

Bleurgyagh.

In case you missed that, that was "Bleurgyagh". Evenings and nights are not fun times in the Bad Mammy household right now. I was hoping to write a nice, victorious post about our success in ditching The Toddler's dummy. The dummy fairy came one night last week and left her a new t-shirt with flamingos on. There was a bit of whingeing the first few nights, and my parents resorted to it when she stayed at theirs, after an hour and a half of screaming, but otherwise we were about to tentatively about to call it a win. And then it went a bit to pot.

The Toddler is being horrific. To be honest, I'm not sure if it is to do with dummy (although I do know that it would make it better, and have just had to throw the remaining ones in the bin to ensure I didn't cave), or that she's a bit poorly (she sprouted another random rash the other day), or if she's teething (she's always teething). But tonight, she did NOT want to go to bed. She didn't want The Hungry Caterpillar. She didn't want Goodnight Maisy. She didn't want to go to bed without a story. She didn't want a song. She didn't want a cuddle. She just wanted to scream. And scream. And scream. Finally, we gave up trying to cajole her into lying down, and left her to it. Which is really, really hard. In my head, I KNOW that she is just shouting for the sake of it, that she's knackered and really needs to go to sleep, and that every time I go and give her something that she's shouting for (a drink which she's already had, her bear that is right beside her, a song that she won't listen to), I just get her riled up again and prolong the screaming. But it's really hard to ignore your own child screaming for you. Especially when you've got a whole host of internet mums in your head screeching about cortisol and cruelty and abandonment issues. So I quite often end up doing some half-arsed mixture of both, where I sometimes leave her screeching, and sometimes go and give her whatever she wants. Which I'm sure must be extremely confusing for her. I think I worked it out in the end tonight though - going in at regular intervals, lying her back down and giving her a kiss. She is finally asleep. How long she stays that way is anybody's guess. We'll probably be repeating the process at 1am again.

And of course, it's all made much more fun by the presence of The New'un, who has decided to experiment with this cluster feeding thing. It goes something like this: feed for ages, fall half-asleep on boob, get removed from boob, cry, go back on boob, come off boob, be sick, cry for more milk to replace the milk that is now gracing someone's T-shirt, and repeat ALL DAMN EVENING. It's not too bad at the moment, as we can take one each. (I usually get The New'un to placate, which is probably easier, if harder on the nipples. Although Husband would say that The Toddler seriously gets on his tits at times.) But it's making me somewhat terrified about Husband's return to work in a week and a half. I got a taste of how it might be while he was making tea tonight and they both kicked off. I managed to get up off the sofa, go up to The Toddler's room, encourage her to lie back down and give her a kiss, all while feeding The New'un. OK, she popped off at one point, but still, I'm pretty pleased with my skills there. So I guess I'll cope. I guess I have to. But that doesn't mean I have to look forward to it. You can't make me.

Oh well, tomorrow is another day. And we will take The Toddler out and do fun things, and we will approach bedtime with optimism and calm, and hopefully I won't have to do another big boring ranty whingey blog post. But for now, wine.