In the throes of last night’s chaos I actually cried. Actually I do know who I’m feeling the most pity for it’s me, natch. I honestly don’t know who I feel more pity for myself and Tom, our long-suffering and infinitely patient neighbours (we live in a terraced cottage) or the child. However, this week things have deteriorated even beyond the secret middle-of-the-night shame-bottle because now he’s refusing even that and is instead screaming and crying completely inconsolably for hours at a time. I’ve heard about sleep crutches and I frequently went into deep anxiety spirals about whether he would be 16 and still waking me in the night for his sleep crutch bottle. Decisions that I am loath to admit to but here goes… after all attempts to sooth him, cuddle and hum to him failed I would invariably give the child what he wanted: His *whisper it* bottle. This strategy even included some pretty questionable parenting decisions. Until last week or so I had been giving in to his every nocturnal whim, doing whatever presented itself as the quickest path to everyone getting back to sleep. The no-sleeping thing has continued with little signs of improvement but lately the nights have been even worse than usual. I vowed to stay the eff away from Google from then on. At the time, this caused me even deeper levels of despair as according to the search engine no end was in sight. In my last bout of PPG, I was searching for answers to the eternal question… when the eff is he going to start sleeping? As I was Googling the words ‘8 month sleep regression’ I noticed that as I was typing, the search engine was offering several prompts below the text bar sleep regression 10 months, sleep regression 14 months, sleep regression 18 months, sleep regression 3 years and so on. Guaranteed if you admit to others that you are a PPG (parenting problem Googler) it will be met with shrieks of “DON’T Google stuff!” Googling is like a red rag to a hypochondriac, if you’re anywhere near as hysterical as I am, a google too far and you could end up diagnosing bubonic plague when it’s just a runny nose. At the beginning of this year, I wrote here about the dangers of Googling parental queries.
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