When I used to have a really young baby that I was nursing, my schedule got all out of whack and I found sometimes I’d be awake at 2:30am and not be able to get back to sleep, so I’d go down to our office and send emails to my friends with entertaining time-stamps.
The past couple of weeks Gal Smiley has had real trouble sleeping at night and tonight was the worst. She’s been awake for the past 2 1/2 hours — not crying, just awake and alternating between playing with her stuffed sheep, calling for me, and futzing around. I just now put her down after reading many books and giving her some juice so hopefully it will take, but now I’m awake.
It’s only 11:30 in California…anyone awake out there?
TurtleHead 
Sorry I missed you last night. But needless to say, we can identify.
Raspberry (I guess that will be his screen name) is proving to be a top-notch sleeper, with one caveat — he doesn’t like to sleep at night. Just try to wake him up during the day. I dare you. It can’t be done! But at around 9pm or so, he’s suddenly awake, and has no interest in sleeping. Not only that, he’s never quite comfortable and is quite ‘vocal’ about his dissatisfaction.
I’m sure this will pass, but at the moment, he is definitely giving my patience a lot of exercise…
You have my full sympathy…we’ve been there! Raspberry is a little young to be on any kind of schedule but in a couple of weeks you’ll probably see him settling down a bit. Then his uber-cranky time will be more like 6-8pm :).
I’d recommend getting a Baby Bjorn baby carrier. Either of you can strap him in and walk around with him and at his age, he is most likely to find that position the most comforting. The carrier will help you hold him for a long time without getting tired and will also free up your hands if you want to get a drink or change channels on the remote control. Once he is a little bit bigger — 8 weeks or so — and you are trying to settle him down at bedtime for a longer “nighttime” sleep — the carrier is a must-have as the nighttime process will take a couple of hours and your arms will fall off unless you have some mechanical help.
There are other brand names, but Baby Bjorn is the best in my opinion. It’s worth the extra cost for the superior baby-loading method and super-comfy straps.
Thanks for reminding us that we have one of those Baby Bjorn thingies! 🙂 I’ll try to get it set up for tonight. Even though he’s still just over 7 lbs, the little one is starting to make my back ache. And I’ve already experienced the difficulty of trying to hold a squirmy baby and change channels (I’ve also noticed that it takes twice as long as the running time of a program to actually watch it now!).
Okay, here’s a request for advice: how old do they have to be before you can start using a swing? We were given one from someone, so it didn’t come with a manual.
Hmmm … Raspberry seems a little too effeminate of a nickname for our son. We may have to look for something else …
Personally I was thinking of 007 Junior, in honour of the fact that thinks that should be played by Pierce Brosnan in a movie about his life.
Some babies really love a swing and it can be a Godsend. Does your swing have a bassinet attachment, where the baby can lie down? If so, you can use that right away. If not, if it’s just a chair, I think you could use it right away as long as it reclines, like your car seat. We had a swing with a bassinet and a chair, but the chair didn’t recline while swinging, so we only started to use the chair feature (with a half-moon-shaped head pillow, the kind you can get for using in car seats) when our kids were 2 months old.
They both loved it though. Ours was a hand-crank model and when you wound it up completely it would run for about 20 minutes. So we knew when we put the kid in it, we had 20 minutes of peace to grab dinner, tidy, and get back to it!