Ellen’s Blog: Sleep Trials

Our three-year old son is not a very good sleeper. Actually, that’s not quite true - he is an excellent sleeper, but generally does not wake up in the same bed in which he went to sleep…..He tends to sneak out of his own bed during the night, and ends up either in his brother’s bed or his parents’. He has learned to do so very stealthily, so as to completely avoid detection.

We’ve tried everything to get him to stay in his own bed - reward chart (he got bored of it), reward sweets (he came to expect them every day and was extremely disgruntled when we decided this arrangement was unsustainable) and finally buying him a new bed with ladder and integrated storage (good space-saver, not so good as an incentive to remain in his own bedroom). Exhausted by the very poor quality of sleep I was getting due to the lack of space in the bed / being elbowed in the face during the night etc, we decided to take action; rather than roll over and go back to sleep on discovering the miniature intruder, we resolved always to put him back, no matter how much fuss he made, or how bone-achingly tired we were.

This was absolutely exhausting, but seemed to be working after a week or so of returning him to his bed 3 or 4 times per night. My husband was particularly pleased with this result as he is the closest thing to a male version of Super Nanny Jo Frost. Then I had a wobble - after a late night at work while my husband was away over night, I came home to find the children still awake (result of a mis-communication with my au pair during the phonemail to notify her of the lateness). While his big brother willingly went to bed, completely exhausted, the little brother used all his finest delaying tactics to very successful effect with me and managed to keep me talking and reading him an extra story for about an hour. That hour was the best quality-time I’d had with him all week (if not all month), but it seems to un-do the the previous hard work with re-enforcing the message to him about staying in his bed at night (rather than waking up, having a chat and trying to stay awake until mummy falls asleep……)

I neglected to mention this whole episode to my husband (who is still none the wiser, but was slightly confused by the sudden reversal of the progress previously achieved with the always-putting-him-back strategy). I’m now almost back at square one with this whole initiative, but I can’t honestly say I regret my hour of quality time with my little man, who is growing up so quickly.

So I’m not going to punish myself for failing to deliver on the agreed strategy for managing the nocturnal disturbances; it was worth it. Similarly I’ve made a list of other things for which I’ve decided that life is too short for feeling guilty about; this includes (but is not limited to): being late for sports day due to a mechanical fault on the train; being unable to get to the parents ‘evening’ at school (for which appointments were between 4 and 6pm); forgetting my nephew’s birthday; not realising for a week that my son had brought home another boy’s blazer in his school bag; eating an entire family-sized jumbo bag of crisps on the train home; going for a manicure; working late (in order to prepare for our forthcoming summer holiday).

The list could go on….I’m sure it will!