Stupid Time Change

Whoever dreamt up changing clocks back and forth for "Daylight Savings Time" or "British Summer Time" clearly did not have a small baby. Especially a small baby who they had just barely gotten on a sleeping schedule. If I ever meet the genius who invented this sleep-routine-ruiner I will be sure to give them a piece of my mind.... although I suspect they may have died a long time ago.

Here in the UK we changed our clocks back one hour and it is wreaking havoc in our house. It took me ages to get Frostina on a sleeping schedule. It started with bed time which we have been doing for quite a while now. Bath time at 6, bottle right after that, and in bed sleeping by 6:30. She would wake up once in the night to eat, usually around 2 and then back to sleep until around 6:30 or so. I would have liked her to sleep until 7 but I found that trying to put her to be any later than that just resulted in her waking up earlier.

Naps have been a bit more of a struggle. Frostina has never been a big fan of napping. But I was finally making some progress. A 45 min to 1 hr nap around 8:30am and then another nap around 12'ish. This second one sometimes went longer than an hour. Then I usually could get her to take another around 3. Then she was awake until the bedtime routine started.

I'm not saying things were perfect. She would sometimes want to be up at 5am (ugh) and sometimes wouldn't want to nap at our agreed upon time (well I agreed but obviously she didn't). But overall it was looking promising. I have given up a few daytime activities in order to try and get this sleeping schedule going and it was nice to see that it was worth it.

Until this weekend,,,,,,,,, and that stupid time change.

Now it's all out the window.

I know you're thinking, "Well it's only an hour, what's the big deal?" Here's what the big deal is. Last night I had to put her to bed at 5pm because she was too tired and cranky for me to try and push her to the "new" 6pm. As a result, she was up at 12:30 for her night feed and then a bright and shiny 4:30am in the morning.

Baby waking up at 4:30 and wanting to start her day is completely unacceptable to me! So I did what every good mother does. I shut off the baby monitor, shoved her dummy/pacifier back in her mouth, shut her bedroom door, and prayed for sleep.... mine and hers.

This worked ok. I did have to get up several times yesterday morning and this morning to re-insert dummy/pacifier and plod back into my own bed. But each morning I refused to get her up and out of her bed until after 6am.

But since she was actually awake earlier than the time I let her out of her bed, she needed to nap earlier. So now her morning nap was at 7:30 and that threw off the rest of the day. I ended up trying to put her down 5 separate times for naps. I got about 30-45 minutes on 4 of those attempts. So it's just a mess. She no longer knows when she should be sleeping and neither do I.

Why do we have to do this again???

Anyway, tonight I'm going to try and push her bedtime back by 15 minutes and see how that goes. If that works then I'll try pushing it later and later until we get back to the "new" 6pm.

That should probably take a couple of weeks to get sorted and then we will be off for our trip home to California where the time difference will be 8 hours...... good times!!!