Wow... I wasn't expecting this!

OK. I said this was going to be an honest account of how hard it is to look after a little one for 6 months, here goes:

So today was difficult. - "I-told-you-so" is not a helpful response, mothers!

When I started this on Monday (and Tuesday to an extent) it was an easy life. Emilia would sleep for 15 of the 24 hours that the day has been divided into and I could fill the other 9 hours with feeding, playing, singing nonsense and "dancing" about the house with her in my arms.

The biggest concern I had was how I was going to keep my brain from turning to mush during the days and what I could do to encourage Emilia's development while I had her to myself.

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Yesterday, all that changed. Yesterday we woke at 04:something for a bottle and then went back to bed for a couple of hours but that was the last she saw of the inside of her eyelids until 19:00 when she was bathed and put to bed.
I knew from what little experience I had (i.e. I had been told by Emma) that without decent naps during the day, she would not sleep well at night. We had already bought tickets for Iron Man 3 (I'm not going to get sidetracked with a review here) and organised a baby-sitter so when she came round at 19:00 I ran through the problems we had had and explained that we were just down the road etc if needed and we went off to enjoy ourselves for 2 and a half hours.

We got back to a soundly sleeping baby and no reports of anything other than peace and quite in the time we were away. I thought I may have been misinformed. I hadn't been...


We had a couple of sleeping grizzles during the night which woke me up enough to go and check on her but she was sleeping. She then woke up at 04:45 for a bottle. Not too bad but we got up for the day at 07:24.

I don't know what was wrong with her today but she didn't sleep in the morning and slept for about 30 minutes after baby group.
She then drained a bottle at about 15:00 and fell asleep in my arms but every time I got up to go upstairs with her she would wake up and she point-blank refused to go back to sleep in her own cot.

I was the only place she would sleep and it meant I couldn't and I couldn't do any house-work either. Not that that's a bad thing in itself, but the house is now trashed and it's depressing me.

I will be honest, I struggled today. I'm running out of ways to be entertaining / interesting and am running out of energy too.
I think I'm sleeping the right number of hours but they're broken hours.

To give you an idea, the books recommend that at 6 months old she should be having 2 naps, totalling 3-4 hours and then be sleeping for 10-11 hours at night.

Roll-on Saturday!