Tuesday 20th January 2009The Joys of Fatherhood

So Natalie is now about 2 weeks shy of 6 months old. It seems an auspicious time to review life with her so far.

I absolutely love her, and there is no way I would change our decision of having her. When she is happy, which thankfully is most of the time, she is extremely cute and it's fun either playing with her or just watching her.

As she gets older and starts doing new stuff (reaching out for things, "talking", pulling off her own socks, or my glasses) she just becomes more delightful.

The only issues we've really had are around sleeping. When she wakes up, she tends to start crying, and not stop. It just gets worse until she starts hyperventilating and can't settle herself at all. We're not really keen to try the "let them cry until they pass out from lack of oxygen" method of self-settling. But she usually only requires one or two visits from us (usually Andrea) until she happily sleeps all night, and has been for a couple of months now.

Immunisations tend to throw her for about a week. Thankfully we don't have any more of those until 15 months.

Then there are the bad days. Occasionally, she gets grumpy. We assume this has something to do with being tired, or having a cold or similar, but when she's grumpy she doesn't like sleeping, which makes her more tired, and more grumpy. It's usually a whole day that gets stuffed up, again mainly for Andrea. There's nothing fun about trying to go shopping with a crying baby.

Last Sunday would be the worst night we've had to date. She had a cold. When she was asleep she'd sniff, get a bit of snot in her throat, and then cough it up. This would of course wake her up, and she'd be scared because she didn't know what was going on. Then she'd cry, and not go back to sleep, which made her over-tired etc.

Eventually, the only way she would sleep for longer than 10mins was on my chest. We discovered this at 1am. So Andrea managed to get around 3.5 hours sleep, and I got 1 (it's hard to sleep with a baby on your chest), but made up for it a bit later in the morning. Thankfully my bosses have both got babies about 6 months older than Natalie, so they understand.

Still, as hard as it was we coped, and that means we can cope again if we need to. Hopefully we won't, but it's good to be prepared. We now have some Baby Vicks that would hopefully make it easier, and a bit more advice to try if needs be.

So it is hard, but at the same time it's totally worth it. If you're thinking about having kids, I can heartily recommend it.