His needs obviously need to be met and as a consequence, William has suffered. At two and half adapting to a new addition must be hard enough but one which screeches in the night and constantly wakes you and demands your parents attention all day must be considerably more difficult. Overall he has coped pretty well. We did have a period with him not sleeping and having major tantrums in the night, which he eventually told us was because he was frightened by the high pitched screech waking him. With some on-line support from Jo Frost via Twitter (she'll never know how grateful we are that she took the time to help) and her Confident Toddler Care book, we worked through it and he's now back to sleeping through. Having always been a good sleeper we didn't experience sleep deprivation with him. As a baby when he slept I slept. If I had a bad night with him I napped in the day when he was sleeping. When you have two children this is obviously not possible. With them both awake all night we were pushed to the very edge. Exhausted and frustrated my marriage and sanity have been put to the test. My closest friend calls daily to check I'm still holding onto the window ledge. As much as we laugh we know the past few months have taken me as close to depression as I would ever like to get.
Things are improving. We have good and bad days and at least for now we have worked on making things as easy as possible for William and he seems happy. We now need to try and help Thomas. He has another appointment of Friday when they'll decide whether to do a PH test to confirm his symptoms are caused by reflux and rule out other causes for his discomfort. Hopefully soon my blog will be full of photos and posts of my happy family out and about doing the fun things we should be doing now. Until then we keep muddling by and hope and pray things improve.
Donna.....x
