Daily Autism : sleep 1/3 – LIKE a baby.. PRETTY PLEASE ?

This is a 3 part series about SLEEP in our house. Today – as a baby.

When Nemo was a newborn, I was fully expecting some sleep deprivation and he did not disappoint: He slept long periods during the day, relatively peaceful when with me, but then got into a fury at what is considered “bedtime”. He had very sketchy sleep patterns all through the night.

Now there were a couple of reasons I wasn’t really thinking this was abnormal. There was the breastfeeding – I thought I would manage to regulate it somehow. I had read that human babies kind of need a 3-month adaptation phase to “life outside mum” – that still makes a bit of sense to me today.

Waking up to nurse him (often..) was no big deal, I went back to sleep quick enough but it did worry me when I could not figure how to “catch the sleepy train” that my clever parenting book was talking about. Oh, he’d catch that train in the day alright, but between 5 – 11 pm, even past midnight..Not a chance. My child was quite a nocturnal creature.

We were also living in what I will just call a ‘domestically precarious’ situation at the time, and it’s true, some days I there was simply too much going on for him to settle down. It was bad.

Autism was not at all at my horizon, but today I think that at least some of it makes more sense. A homeopath ended up deducing that my son was reliving his birth every night! Nemo’s birth hadn’t exactly been a smooth affair for the two of us, and the hours seemed about right, but I wasn’t exactly convinced.

I ended up taking all kinds of measures – that’s what we do when things really need to get better, right? Which one(s) actually helped is less clear in consequence… So was it those homeopathic pearls dissolved in his water? Or the loud white noise from the radio (and it had to stay ON)? What about the swaddle blanket – that I was so ashamed of I did not even photograph him in it once! He smiled once he was firmly tucked up in it. Total bliss!

Today I am more thinking sensory overload with life on earth than inner birth clock on repeat. And I still think any baby might feel like this in the first month, but for my baby Nemo, it was SO DAMN INTENSE. And so it was quite intense for me too.