Our new next door neighbours have a seven month old baby boy and since we moved in a month ago (a month! Where does the time go?), we have barely heard him. Occasionally we hear a little sample of his wailing at around 11pm but generally he sounds like a pretty quiet child. Goodness only knows what they make of our two loud marauding monsters...
Anyway, last night he was NOT a happy chappy. Usually he whimpers for a few minutes and settles pretty quickly but this time he wasn’t having a bar of it. Dh and I lay in bed (after double-checking that it wasn’t one of ours making the noises – they are generally much louder) and unlike our old next door neighbour, resisted the urge to knock on the wall, wail like a child or start banging doors and shouting in a right old huff. By the by, since we moved G’s sleeping has improved considerably – coincidence??
Instead we lay there and sent vibes of sympathy to our poor neighbours. In fact, I wanted to knock on their door, give them a big hug and tell them that it would be ok. If I could make the last sentence any less patronising than it sounded, I would. We’ve been there.
When the girls were seven months old I wrote a number of despairing posts about their inability to settle at night. Dh and I reminisced (not exactly fondly) about going between the cots, attempting (and largely failing) to console and settle two incredibly overstimulated little girls. I remembered sitting on the (downstairs) toilet and sobbing uncontrollably after failing to settle them after an hour and a half one evening, during a long succession of bad nights and severely broken sleep. They were screaming upstairs. I was sobbing downstairs and dh was on the late shift. It felt like the end of the world.
Dh and I tried to remember when the girls started sleeping through the night. I remembered the first night that R and G slept from midnight to 6am. I woke up and felt like I had new eyes. Dh remembered when the girls first started sleeping from 8am to 6pm – we used to feed them at 10.30pm and one night he suggested we experiment with not feeding them. I was terrified that we would be punished with a 2am wake-up call but to my complete surprise, they slept through. That was the beginning of the routine that has served us so well.
Nearly two years on - older, wiser, with many more hours of sleep deprivation under our belts and infinitely more smug – dh and I can look back on those days and (mostly) smile on them as distant memories, not to be repeated. Dh joked that it was like having ‘Nam flashbacks: “I LOVE the smell of Sudocrem in the morning”.
We just send lots of empathy and hugs to our next door neighbours. They seem lovely and we’ll offer them help if they need it. Again, I sound desperately patronising but the sentiments are heartfelt.
