The Sleep (less) Chronicles – October edition

In terms of sleep, my kids have all been different. Seb wouldn’t do more than 45 minutes at a time usually (perhaps the odd 90 minutes if we were lucky) in the first six months, and then suddenly started sleeping through 7am – 7pm. Now he is fairly easy to get to bed, and usually gets up at a reasonable hour in the morning.

D slept for up to 5 hours at a time until she was 13 months (with spells of far more frequent waking interspersed within those months) and then began sleeping for a reasonable amount of time.

So when Little B arrived, my expectations were low.

Getting a toddler to sleep…

She was always somewhere between the two – sleeping a bit but not too much – and we have had nights where she will sleep from 7 til 7. Occasionally…

Thing is, she’s at that tricky age where she kind of doesn’t need a nap, otherwise she is dancing around the front room with a big grin on her face and loads of energy until 10pm. But if you remove the nap, then be prepared for toddler-meltdown-extremis. She is NOT a happy bunny (or should I say ‘NO, I not bunny ANY MORE!!’) and by 7pm her eyelids are drooping and attempting anything kind of nighttime-normal such as a bath, pyjamas or brushing teeth is met with incredible outrage. So the whole actual getting her to bed to sleep thing is just as difficult as the napping and staying up option really.

And then, there is the night waking.

She does have a bed. A very nice bunk, in the same room as D. I got her some coveted Peppa Pig bedding, and a new duvet and pillow, and we made it all very exciting. She’s very, very happy to climb into it and tell everyone its her bed. Well, until its actually bedtime anyway, and then – just like everything pretty much at the moment – it becomes a member of the ‘don’t want that one ANY MORE’ club too. Back into our bed she climbs.

This is pretty much what night-time looks like at the moment:

If I DARE to try and move myself over, or to push her slightly more into alignment, there is all hell to pay. Sometimes there is just all hell to pay anyway, and she screams in my ear for a while and then falls back asleep whilst I lie there listening to the Other Half snore through it all obliviously.

I keep telling myself its just a phase. She’s only 2.5 years old. Her brother and sister were in our bed for…no hang on a minute, actually they weren’t. They never did this. They LOVE their beds.

AAAARRRGGGHH.

I’m off to sleep on the sofa.