breebop.com

Yes, it’s been a loooong while since I have posted. For this, I blame baby.

I know there are zillions of mommybloggers who manage to post (daily!) despite the intense demands of their babies. I don’t know how they do it.

Wesley is now taking regular naps, but for only 40 minutes at a time. As for sleeping through the night … ha … from when he goes to bed until I go to bed, he wakes every 40 minutes or less.

We cope through unintentional co-sleeping. Try as I might to stay awake, I am so tired I fall asleep nursing when he wakes in the night. Once curled up with me, we usually get at least one three-hour stretch of sleep in the deep dark of the night. At least it doesn’t usually take long to get Wes back to sleep - it’s staying asleep that’s the problem.

Meanwhile, the baby development newsletters and the books mock me with reminders that most babies are sleeping through the night and even night-weaning now. I am comforted by regular visits to Ask Moxie, where I re-read the posts on sleep problems, filled with hundreds of comments from other moms and dads with babies who sleep as poorly (or worse!).

The hardest part of baby-parenting, I think, is the sleep deprivation. It makes everything more difficult. I am pretty good at coping with it in the day to day, but I notice it makes it harder to be patient, to remain calm when Wesley is crying, and most of all, to set and stick to priorities. I find myself flitting from task to task. There’s so much to do, and when I’m tired I find it hard to focus. I start picking up the accumulated detritus in the living room and then I get distracted by something or remember I still haven’t had breakfast and then I just get the cereal poured into the bowl … and the baby wakes up. Meanwhile, the computer is a giant time-sink. I go to quickly check email and wind up on Facebook or Google Reader.

I think about blogging, but I just haven’t had the energy, let alone the time. And anyway, what would I write? ‘My baby had a giant green poop today!’? I’m no Finslippy with the gift of making even baby poo seem hilarious.

I’m a big bucket-o-complaints today. Other days it’s all rainbows and sunshine, but right now this tired mama just wants baby to go to bed and stay there!

There are some signs of improvement: Wes is now taking regular naps in the crib (as a newborn he just wouldn’t sleep, and then would only sleep on top of me) and he’s going to bed much more easily (it used to take hours to get him to bed, then he’d be awake again 40 minutes later for another hour of rocking).

When I can step away from the big ball of frustration that he won’t sleep how I want him to, I can see that there are probably a number of likely causes for the waking:

1. Wesley is learning to crawl. He just started actually moving forward in a coordinated way two days ago (as opposed to vain squirming on the floor). He has been turning over in his sleep and waking up on hands and knees in a total panic; I think he’s been trying to crawl in his sleep too.
2. Wesley is readjusting his daytime nap schedule. He can stay awake for more than two hours at a stretch now, and also seems to want to take longer naps … but he hasn’t learned how to put himself back to sleep on his own. He has been waking at the 40-minute mark and crying, but fusses if I get him up. He keeps rubbing his eyes and showing other signs of wanting to go back to sleep. If I put him back to bed, he will often nap for another 20-40 minutes. I think he’s aiming for fewer, longer naps (he had been on a regular schedule of napping 20 to 40 minutes every 1 1/2 to 2 hours throughout the day).
3. And the biggie: Wesley hasn’t learned how to fall asleep on his own. I try to put him down awake, but if he’s not sleepy enough he wakes up all the way when he hits the mattress and then has an even harder time going to sleep. I try to rock or nurse him until he’s just falling asleep and then transition him to crib. It works during the day, but sometimes at night he panics and wakes even when I start to move towards the crib, no matter how sleepy he seems. It doesn’t seem to make a difference to the frequency of waking if he falls asleep in the crib with minimal help from me or if I rock or nurse him until he’s unconscious.
4. He may also be teething.

We are trying to stay away from a cry-it-out solution, and we’ve tried following all the usual advice (regular naps, early bedtimes, regular bedtime routine, nurse or rock only until sleepy but not asleep, making sure he’s got a full tummy, even co-sleeping) but Wesley just seems to be one of those kids who has a really hard time sleeping ‘normally’ no matter what we do.

I just heard back from BlueHost’s so-called customer service again regarding the prospect of any kind of refund or credit to my account for the six months of lost hosting due to their incompetence. They told me in their last email that they would not compensate me in any way for the lost service because “this is the first contact we have received from you about this error”, even though I had contacted them several times after the point at which the error logs show the problem had been resolved on my account (all that was needed was for a technician to ’switch off’ the error message blocking access to my site). I emailed them the documentation I have showing that I had made this contact, and this is the response I got:

Hello,

I am not saying it was the first time. It is the first time we have heard from you since January. If the issue never got resolved I am sorry for that but the website cannot be that important to you since you did not call or mention the issue to us for 6 months. Again I am sorry your site was down for so long but you need to contact us. This is not an error that we will just find and fix unless the customer complains that it is not working. The decision remains the same we will not be issuing any credits to the account. If you have any other questions please let us know.

Thanks,

Light M.
Sales Team Lead
BlueHost.com

The importance of my site is not the issue. The fact is that the last correspondence I had received from BlueHost prior to restarting the conversation was:

Sory you will have to figure that out. We provide the webspace not support to troubleshoot scripts. I would suggest removing all add-ons that you husband doenst have. Start there, this is something you will have to figure out. [sic]

Nate

L1 Tech Support

So BlueHost told me it was my problem, and there was nothing they would do to help. Silly me, I believed them. I spent months trying to troubleshoot with my limited tech skills and Google’s help, and nothing worked. I know now, it’s because the problem was resolved on January 15, probably by the first few things I tried, but BlueHost needed to turn off the error messaging. And they didn’t. I contacted them at least three times after the problem should have been resolved, and got no support. After those months of frustration, I had a baby, and as anyone who has had one knows, there’s barely time to pee or shower. Troubleshooting a hopeless problem is low on the hierarchy of needs.

I had some small hope that BlueHost would step up and offer some kind of balm for this horrendous customer service experience. Instead they show themselves to be as rude, abrasive and unhelpful as always. My greatest hope now is that my story will come up when prospective new customers Google BlueHost before committing to a hosting package, so that others know the risks of engaging with this company. Once again, I offer the caution to others: do not host your site with BlueHost. Should something go wrong, you’re not only on your own, but even if it is clearly their error, they will hold you responsible and show no mercy and offer no compensation for their mistake.

I’ve been over six months on hiatus, and have lost all my blog archives because someone with my hosting provider, Bluehost, appears to have forgotten to flip a switch.

All the ‘CPU Exceeded’ error messages everyone’s seen for the last six months or so have been a technician’s mistake. Apparently the error was resolved back in January, but the block was never removed from my account, so I thought the various fixes I’d tried were ineffective. After several fruitless attempts to communicate with the Bluehost ‘help’ folks in which they told me again and again to ‘check my scripts’ I uninstalled WordPress in a desperate hope that it might fix the problem. The error messages persisted, and by this point, I was having a baby and was otherwise occupied.

Baby’s now two months old, and I finally had a moment to contact Bluehost tech support again and ask them to look into the issue. After a few exchanges (during which they told me to check my scripts, and in which I told them I had no more scripts to check!), I finally got this message back:

I am sorry that the error never came off. I am ahving a L3 remove the accoutn suspended error. [sic]

Bluehost can’t do anything to replace the years of blogging purged in this mess, but I am hoping they’ll at least have the decency to compensate me for the last six months of downtime. I registered several domain names through them, as well as paying for a fairly hefty hosting package, which have all been blocked since January.

All I can say is beware of Bluehost. If you’re thinking of signing with them, forget it. There are so many providers out there, you don’t need to risk trouble with one that has already demonstrated incompetence. And back up your archives. I always meant to but never got around to it. I tried to once the CPU errors began, but it was too late - the error page that blocked my main site also blocked my access to the WordPress admin panel and I was unable to initiate a backup.