Family Life

Sleep, such a simple thing but oh my goodness it’s amazing what an impact it has on your life if you don’t get enough. I love sleep, it’s probably my favourite past time, we have an amazing bed and I could quite happily spend half of my life in it

I thought I had this parenting lark cracked when MissB was only 6 weeks old and started sleeping through the nights, she still sleeps solidly for 12 hours a night. She must take after me as that girl loves her sleep!

Can you imagine what a shock to the system it was when MasterB the worst sleeper in the history of children arrived on the scene? OK so the first 16 nights were fantastic, although this was due to him being in NICU and me being at home. Don’t get me wrong, I’d have loved for him to be home too but it was lovely to have a few decent nights sleep before the mayhem began

So here we are almost 20 months later, yes you read that right TWENTY months later and we still haven’t cracked sleeping. I don’t know exactly where it all went wrong, we didn’t do anything differently than we did with MissB, he just doesn’t sleep.

It all starts at bedtime, he is a nightmare to get to sleep in the first place. We’ve tried everything going and you can’t leave him crying for long as he has previously thrown himself out of his cot in a rage. At present I’m having to wait until he is sleepy then take him upstairs, place him in his cot and stand watching until he falls asleep. If I so much as take a step outside of his room he is on his feet and screaming. When I say screaming I mean really, really screaming.

Once he has gone to sleep, the waiting then begins. He will usually manage until 2am before he wakes and screams the house down. All I need to do is get him up, take him downstairs and cuddle him and he will go back to sleep quite quickly, but having to get up pretty much every night is killing me! Every night I go to sleep expecting to be woken up within a few hours, I’ve forgotten what it feels like to just be able to go to sleep knowing that you don’t have to get up until morning!

I’ve tried different types of blanket, different lighting, different pillows, different toys and nothing seems to make a difference. I wish he could just tell me what it is that causes him to wake screaming every night. It can’t be hunger, thirst, too hot, too cold, being poorly etc as we’ve ruled so much out. We do get some good nights from him but I’d say he still wakes up 4-5 times a week

It’s been such a difficult journey with MasterB to date but we are gradually getting there, we are working on his eyes, we think we’ve got his asthma under control at last and hopefully his hernia will be resolved shortly. But sleep – well I guess it really is the final frontier we need to crack. I think I’ve always wondered whether his inability to sleep is due to his other health problems and as we are gradually fixing all of those, hopefully the sleep will fix itself!