Sleeping - naps and The Big One

I admit that most of the first three or four months of Tom's life have disappeared somewhere in my inadequate memory but I do remember the not sleeping part. For a good three months I didn't sleep more than two hours in one go. I couldn't see how it would ever change and when I'd ever get a night's sleep again.
One weekend we packed ourselves up in the car and went off to Verona for the weekend. I'd booked a B&B near the centre and we got ourselves settled in before going off for a mooch. On our return we decided not to do our usual routine of bed at seven-ish and then a dream-feed at eleven, but instead to keep him awake for as long as possible and then give him his last feed then. He could barely keep open his eyes by eight o'clock and so by the time we'd stuffed him full of warm milk he was out like a light for the next eleven hours. Eleven hours! When I woke the next day I had no idea what time it was, where I was or even who I was. Why hadn't I been woken bleary-eyed and exhausted at three in the morning? Because my baby was sleeping! Oh joy! It was miraculous! Who the hell told us to do this dream-feed thing anyway? The dream-feed used to buy us two hours sleep, but waking at one in the morning or three in the morning is pretty much the same thing anyway. Perhaps it was a coincidence and he was just sufficiently grown to sleep through the night but either way I was like a new woman.
At the start he never slept a lot during the day. Even in the hospital after he was born I'd watch in silent, envious confusion as other babies dozed throughout the day and Tom would wriggle and cry and howl. Which behaviour was normal? Surely the sleeping baby. The nurses there, though, assured me that everything was fine and that Tom was just a super-active baby. Che fortuna. (My Italian sister-in-law has three children, all of whom were perfect little textbook babies, who never cried, did what they were told and ate everything that was put in front of them. Last time she was pregnant I secretly hoped she'd get a hurricane baby like Tom, but to no avail.) The advantage of having such an energetic baby is that now he's reached the stage of toddling around, climbing and wreaking havoc, he wears himself out enough to have two ninety minute naps a day, enough time for me to do my housework, get myself sorted for mealtimes and have a little flutter on the gee gees.