When the baby who sleeps, stop sleeping!

SLEEP! I feel like I can’t remember what a full nights sleep even feels like yet I can clearly remember, only a few months ago, feeling rather smug as I shared my tips to help other little ones sleep better. I remember being able to confidently say ‘both my girls sleep all night’ yet my current sleep deprived state doesn’t allow me to remember what it actually felt like to get a regular full nights sleep. I’m talking 8 sometimes 9 hours a night! Complete bliss, a blissful few months that I really wish I had enjoyed more at the time! It turns out however that those blissful few months were in fact a phase! Why has it taken me so long to realise that while the difficult parts of parenting are often put down to ‘being a phase’ or ‘a stage that too shall pass’ the positive, wonderful achievements such as teaching your child to seep all night could also be a phase! I realise that now! I realise that while my little girl had the ability to sleep in her cot for the entirety of the night something has changed and she no longer can! For the last few weeks I have wasted what little energy I have on trying to figure when it changed and why it might have changed but at the start of this week it hit me that I needed to stop focusing on what had caused this unexplained sleep regression, stop just surviving the long nights and start planning how to help my little O learn to sleep again. At the end of the day she is only 22 months old, it is my job to be calm and in control for her through the long dark nights when all I really want to do is pull the pillow over my head and hope that the hubby goes through to her before I do.

MUMS KNOW BEST! It’s true, as a mum I like to think that I know best and actually most of the time I do, or at least I do when it comes to my girls. Nobody knows them like I do so it stands to reason that when it comes to them I usually know best but this week I realised that I was getting it very wrong for my Little O and guess who made me realise that, yup you got it! My mum! And all it took was for me to send a message to my wonderful family asking if any of them would like to give O a new home; ‘her off button is broken, her sleep button is also broken, oh and her volume button is also broken’ I wrote as I began a day with an overtired baby, feeling exhausted myself and being extremely mature, holding a grudge against said baby who actually couldn’t understand why Mummy was so grumpy and being so unreasonable! That was when my mum sent a private message offering me her words of wisdom. While I hate to admit it, lots of what she said made sense and so this is the week when I plan to regain control of those horrid sleepless nights and support my little girl through this difficult phase (which of course I am sure it is!) In an ideal world in two weeks time, I will be able to tell you all that everything I have tried has worked and you will all have the ingredients for a perfect nights sleep but lets be honest (and realistic) it probably won’t so my aim is simple. My aim is to share this journey with you, to hopefully help your sleepy eyes see a different way through the long nights, to hopefully find something that works for little O so she can feel safe and secure enough to relearn how to sleep through the night (most of the time) and to feel as though I am in control again being proactive in my bid to help O sleep instead of being reactive! Follow this blog to find out what I try and how it works for us! I promise to be completely honest, if something works I will share it with a huge feeling of pride, if something doesn’t work I will put my hands up and say ‘ooops, i got it wrong!’