Yeah, yeah. We all know it. New parents don’t get any sleep and spend several months in a permanent state of sleep deprivation. But what I didn’t know was how it would start way before the baby arrived (having to wee about 4 times in the night during pregnancy) and would carry on for so long afterwards.

It’s got much better – as a newborn, my daughter woke up every two hours at night to be fed. I expected that to last for the first three or four months.

She’s now seven months old and for the last two months, nights are exhausting in a different kind of way. She goes to bed at 8pm and she now has a formula bottle at bedtime (the rest of the time, she’s breastfed and has two small portions of pureed food as well). She sleeps for three or four hours, I feed her and she goes to sleep again. But then, between around 3-7am, she wakes up every 30-60 minutes and cries unless she is breastfed. I’ve tried giving her a bottle. I’ve tried giving her water. I’ve tried the dummy. I’ve tried cuddling and/or rocking her. She won’t have any of it and I am completely exhausted.

Her latest trick is to only have two short naps in the day (yesterday that only totalled one hour!) and then she slept EVEN WORSE at night. I felt like she woke up every hour from 1am and today I feel absolutely shattered.

I really hope this will sort itself out soon or that other people at least experience something similar!