Sleep Clinic - Visit 2

We had Connor's follow up visit to the sleep clinic last week (last week was crazy so I'm only just catching up with the blog this week, sorry).  It went really well.

My petal is reacting well to the Melatonin.  He's starting to sleep less during that day, but I think that's because his nights are so much better.  He doesn't take 2.5 hours and 1.5 litres of milk to get to sleep every night anymore and he hasn't had night terrors in weeks.

So the big problem, I told the doctor, is he still wakes up at least 2 or 3 nights a week at about 3am and can't be resettled.  He then yells and cries and bashes his cot until dawn.  Back before Merryn I would have just slept the rest of the night in the armchair holding him and soothing him.  But now I have her waking multiple times every night so I can't just disappear into his room and not come out for the rest of the night.

No problem she says, let's try this:
   1. Try giving him a tiny bit more melatonin around 11pm to top him up.  The drops don't last in the body more than about 3 hours, so that might just give him the extra he needs to get through the night.
   2. If that doesn't work (as she noted Connor is a VERY light sleeper it might just wake him up and cause more trouble than it fixes) then we can go to slow release tablets.  They last all night and we could just feed them to him in some yoghurt.  Of course this wonderful solution has a downside, the tablets aren't on the PBS, so it would cost us the debt of a small foreign country to pay for it.
  3. Try putting him to bed a bit later.  He might just need a bit less sleep.

So, we have a plan and over the next two months we will be trying that out to see if we can overcome the final hurdle in the great Connor sleeping conundrum.

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As a note, the doctor also said if I haven't sorted Merryn by the time I come back in with Connor she will see her too.  Sometimes the low Melatonin levels can run in families.  I thought that was VERY nice of her and it gives me a backup if I am still stuck with her by then.