How we learned to stop worrying and love the madness

Luca is eating! Actual food! Thanks to our meticulous planning he is now on a regular diet of breast milk, formula milk, baby rice, gooey baby fruit stuff, and the odd finger-dab of ice cream, yoghurt, strawberry or whatever else we happen to be eating. Sod the routine, sod the gradual introductions to new food, time to get messy.

Being used to bottles and breasts that keep on giving, he's struggled with the concept of solid food from a spoon. Specifically, the three seconds in between mouthfuls, when he demands to know why the hell the last spoonful wasn't immediately followed by another.

But I'm happy to say that he takes after his dad in eating anything and everything we put in front of him.

This is the way it's going. We're not ignoring the advice of books, health visitors, and breastfeeding counsellors, we're just mixing it up a little. Our latest theory, which will change at least eight times in the next 24 hours, is that instinct should win out over routine.

People are chaotic, tiny people even more so. He is nowhere near learning how to sleep through the night. But instead of listening to him cry at 4am in a vain effort to 'teach' him, we just feed him every time he seems to want it. Everyone sleeps more, everyone's happier, and Gina Ford can kiss my hairy white ass.

We are also the proud new owners of a Tiny Love Symphony in Motion Mobile. Apparently it might help him get to sleep on his own. He might yet learn to love it, but he might not.

The gates of hell

Finally, it comes - bloodshot eyes, apocalyptic rage over trivial matters, crying that pierces the cavities of our brains, 15-minute stretches of screaming that feel like hours and carry us to the brink of insanity.

Come in sleepless nights, we've been expecting you.

I've had 12 hours sleep in the past week and I have literally felt the flames of hell on my toes. Fuck off sub editors, I DO mean literally.

Luca has cried his way through the nights and made us question everything we thought we were doing right. The bath-massage-feed-bed routine is laughing at us. The other night he screamed through every step of it. Then screamed at what seemed like three-minute intervals for the entire night.

What's worst, impossibly, is when he IS sleeping. When he's calm for half a priceless hour, and my mind is telling me, pleading with me, that now is the time to sleep.

In case you've never heard it, it's almost impossible to sleep to the din of your own mind's impassioned reasoning. 'Sleep now man, sleep while you have the chance. Sleep now or never again!'

Then, before I know it, it's 5.34am, Luca's at it again, and the prospect of getting up for work in two hours looms like a slow dance with Satan himself.

Yes, I was warned. Yes, we've had it pretty easy up till now. And if you want to say you told me so, then I'll agree and shake you by the hand. Except my hand will be like Freddy Krueger's, and I'll shake you by the neck instead. Sorry, I'm just having nightmares. Or am I? I don't even know any more. Night night.

PS. Parents, psychics and anyone at all with an opinion, if you want to offer any life-saving advice on how to make the boy sleep, please use the comments box, we need you!

This book will save your life

Luca has been going to sleep on his own, and staying there, for a couple of weeks now. We have a 'routine' that seems to work: bath, play, baby lotion, big bottle of expressed milk, quick burp, bed.

If I knew how smooth this could be three weeks ago, I wouldn't have believed it. So if you have a baby, and he's being a nightmare, things will improve. Believe.

When he drifts off he takes most of our troubles with him. He sleeps, so he's happy, so we're happy, so we're relaxed, so he relaxes, and so on. The cycle continues; life broken down into the essential elements, everyone getting what they need.

And the mornings are glorious.

Me and Mum are getting time alone together, wine, beer, uninterrupted dinners, wine, telly, online poker, beer and wine. It's my perfect family scenario, like the opposite of Eastenders, with more wine.

The truth is that he's just a really good, easy baby. But my policy has always been to credit our brilliant parenting for the triumphs, and blame nature when things aren't going so well.

We also owe a small debt to Sleep: The Secret of Problem-free Nights. I had my reservations. It looks like it's from 1962, and tends to dictate rather than suggest: "From the first time he sleeps a core night, never feed your baby again during those hours."

Not even if it's 2.3oam, he's screaming like a Banshee on fire, you're too tired to know who or where you are, and he's giving a look that clearly says "Mummy, daddy, what have I done to deserve this? Why are you starving me?".

Because life's tough, son. It says so right here in this book. Bollocks. Obviously when this happened Mum just fed him.

But the book's mantra is right, and I recommend it to all new parents: babies want to sleep, and you just need to find a way to let them do it.

This means putting him down while he's still awake, and letting him go to sleep on his own. Then when he wakes up he isn't surprised by where he is, and can see himself back to sleep.

It is also about not 'rewarding' him for waking too soon. In practice, this means letting him cry and feeling like an evil bastard. But it works.

He sleeps!

Luca is now sleeping in his cot, after I bottled-fed him his last meal of the day, which Mum expressed. I'm never one to overplay my own achievements, but move over Neil Armstrong, Diego Maradona, and Mahatma Fucking Ghandi, because I am the greatest. That's how it felt at the time anyway.

Mum makes this kind of landmark achievement almost every day, with grace and not a hint of self-congratulation. Good for her. I was part of something big tonight.

Incredibly ordinary situations, like drinking an uninterrupted bottle of wine with Mum, take on the glow of privilege. We are here, he is sleeping, all is well.

But I don't want to jinx it and condemn us to months of screaming, so I shouldn't get smug and complacement. Oops, too late.

The joy of poo

Sometimes, changing a nappy can be a truly relaxing experience. The poo, the wool, the water and the wipe. Where else are life's problems so simple? What could ever come close for job satisfaction?

It gets quicker and easier, especially if you're this guy, perhaps the world's only Jujitsu nappy changer. It makes our attempts at post-bath massage look tame. Will definitely try some of his moves.

Then there's the times where you get the nappy straps tangled up, it's 3am, he screaming blue murder, Mum has fed him six times and he's been walked and bounced and burped to no effect.

It's so, so worth it. But sometimes it's hard to see that.

Not that Luca's bothered, swiftly moving onto his first date:


Molly didn't seem so keen, but he's got time to learn.

Do what feels right

One brilliant toy to recommend before more on the getting-baby-to-sleep debate: The Tiny Love Playground. Luca loves it. Or at least he lies still and stares intently at the monkey for a bit. At two weeks old, that counts as love:

Anyway, back to sleep. Two people recommend that I read Gina Ford, the baby guru who says routine is a sure route to more sleep and happier families. I started reading The Complete Sleep Guide for Contented Babies and Toddlers before Luca was born and must admit I found it a little bossy. She is single-minded and tends to divide opinion, but her methods are popular enough that I feel obliged to read more.

The temptation at 2am is to do anything it takes to get Luca to sleep, which so far means letting him sleep on top of Mum or in between the two of us. On the first night, this freaked me out a bit. 

Posters in St George's maternity ward say it increases the risk of cot death, but when we asked the midwife she said this only applied if we were drunk.

Militant Gina Ford routine or go with instinct? We're going to err on the side of instinct, at least in the early days. This was better summed up by dad of a few weeks James:

'She was sleeping so good at first and then went through a bad patch of not wanting to go down. In the end we discovered the only way is to spoil her (from the reading material this seems to be ok for first 6 weeks). Carry them everywhere, let them sleep on you (as they still feel kind of connected to a body) and feed them all the time.'

My sister Aiscia, mother of 2 boys aged 1-18 months, agrees:

'Tread lightly amongst the literature brother, there is a lot of mud to wade through. My advice: if it gets you through, its the right thing to do!'

How do you make a baby go to sleep?

Luca is not a perfect child. There, I’ve said it.

Don’t get me wrong, he is perfect in most ways, and is showing early signs of prodigious talent at pretty much everything. Whether he becomes a captain of industry, world leader or all-conquering sports star depends only on his whim.

If anyone thinks this presumptuous for a week-old baby boy, look at him:

Genius. Can’t you see it? Are you blind?

In the first few days we genuinely thought he was flawless. He slept from midnight to 10am with only one feed, spent a glorious morning with me while Mum caught up on the hardest-earned sleep ever, and generally failed to do any of the annoying things new babies are supposed to do.

We dared to believe we might have hit the jackpot: a baby that lets his parents sleep. We were wrong.

Last night he was happily dozing and feeding all day, but when we got in to bed he was a different creature, wailing and looking desperately unhappy; grabbing angrily at the boob instead of taking a proper mouthful.

It was the first time we had been unable to give him what he wanted and it was a horrible, guilty, gut-wrenching feeling. Our only tactic is to feed him to sleep, and as far as this goes the buck stops with Mum. It’s irrefutable, decreed by nature. 

I feel bad when she tells me to go to sleep while she soldiers on, but also grateful. Very, very grateful. She was up with him till the early hours while i dozed. I’ve been trying to make up for it with the lion’s share of cooking and nappy-changing. Honest.

To make things worse, we then discover that breastfeeding him to sleep is not a good idea in the first place. Apparently it instils bad habits. All I can say is that this is sound, long-term advice, and it's not easy to think long-term at 2.30 in the morning.

So I'd like to ask anyone reading this the most obvious and unanswerable question in all of parenthood: how do you make a baby go to sleep? Please keep your answers to 140 characters or less, so I can test them immediately and tweet them as my own.

Shout to all the ravers

'Chilled-out lullaby versions of Ibiza classics'. Who knew?

Thanks Nursing Times for sending me this modern wonder, featuring 'classics' such as 'Music sounds better with you' and 'Sing it back' - remixed, slowed down and using chimes instead of words.

Some might see this as a cheap way to exploit midlife-crisis stricken new parents desperate for a way, any way, of retaining some hedonism in their tame lives. 

I wave my glow stick and white gloves in these people's faces. Luca raved all day. So much that he finished the night by pissing, shitting, puking and crying all at once. If that's not the sign of a good rave-up, I don't know what is.

Also useful was the Baby Bjorn Air Carrier:

Not only simple to assemble and comfortable for daddy and baby, but the most effective baby sleep-inducer I have ever seen in my five days as a parent.

He was restless, and our family trip to the post office - the second and most ambitious excursion yet, looked doubtful.

What if he started screaming? Would we be able to publicly extract him from the Baby Bjorn? Was mummy up for getting her baps out on Tooting High Street?

Throwing caution to the wind, we went for it. He crashed out as soon as we left and didn't stir till we got back two hours later. Baby Bjorn, I salute you.