Sleeping through?

Last night Ash slept through until 4.30am! Oh My God! That may not sound much for a seven month old (almost, that is) but this is the first time it has ever happened. At least I think it's the first time. I'm so sleep deprived that my memory has gone fuzzy and it's quite possible that this has happened before. But it would be a very rare occurrence, the odd night amongst many, many nights of disturbed sleep.

Ash has generally woken two or three times a night his whole life. Sometimes more. He'd wake and feed around 10 or 11pm, then again 3-4 hours later and then again a couple of hours after that around 4 or 5am. Often he'd decide this is a good time to get up for the day.

And then every now and then we'd have nights where he'd wake every couple of hours. Once he did this for a whole week. Just a few days ago he woke up every 1.5-2 hours. This was the night that we got home after our Christmas break. The night before we'd been up for an hour or so with Phoebe who had a horrible croupy cough, poor bairn. Oh, how tired were we after all of that! It's a rhetorical question (hence the lack of question mark) but the answer is Very!

Sometimes I feed him when he wakes to keep the peace or because I'm too tired to question it and go onto autopilot. And other times I point blank refuse and make Toby get up and settle him. This week he has his two top teeth coming in and the right one is poking through. So if Toby can't settle him then I'll feed him. I figure that's better than paracetamol. (Have I mentioned that he got his first two teeth a week apart when he was four months old?)

So anyway, last night... We went out for dinner with friends and Andrei babysat. Around 9.30pm he heard Ash stir, which he'd done the night before. Only this time he didn't actually wake up and cry. The next we heard from him was at 4.30am. Bliss. Except I spent the entire night worrying, firstly about him and then about my engorged breasts. I sent Toby in to check on him at 1am and couldn't believe it when I woke again at 3am and still hadn't heard from him. Then I became obsessed over my full, sore boobs and couldn't get back to sleep. I finally got up and expressed some milk to make myself more comfortable. No sooner had I got back into bed then he woke for a feed. I'm not sure he went back to sleep after that. Toby got up with him around 5.40am. Isn't that always the way? Baby sleeps all night but parents spend the entire night freaking out that baby has stopped breathing and get even less sleep than usual.

So, a bit of a result but I'm completely knackered. Fingers crossed for a repeat performance tonight that I can actually take advantage of.