My life has changed, forever. Once upon a time, I used to sleep as much as I liked and when I liked. In fact I don’t think I really ever appreciated that my sleeping patterns belonged to me and I could do with my sleep what I liked. That’s when we decided to have kids…

When we brought our little bundle of joy home we expected nice three hour stints of sleep. I hadn’t even really given serious thought to the fact that I wasn’t going to have unbroken sleep for many months (in my case years) to come . I should have been afraid, very afraid. Somewhere in the back , actually deep recesses, of my mind I knew the little guy would wake for feeds because that’s what newborns do. It was expected. What we didn’t expect was our little bundle of joy to wake every hour for a little comfort suckle.
Being a new mom and a complete idiot, I fed him every time he squawked. “Poor little guy is still hungry, “I kept telling myself. Needless to say I fed him until he was like a bloated tick and then he would bring it all up again, screaming.

Here’s lookin at you…

One night my darling husband was in a sleep deprivation induced coma while my greedy baby was once again guzzling at the boob. He groggily looked up at me and said,”Do you think you could do that a little quietly?” I glared at him in the dark in stunned, furious anger and willed lazers to come shooting out my eyes like superman to singe his sleepy butt.

Anyway before you or I judge my man, bear in mind he also hadn’t slept since the day our little blessing was born. I decided that he could be forgiven under the banner of all things sleep deprived. He didn’t even have recollection of said event. At least that’s what he maintains.

Things got slightly more hopeful and our second son settled into routine much better that the first. About four years after our parenting journey began we finally started getting some semblance of a full nights sleep. My awesome husband managed to train our boys, by example, how to sleep quite late in the morning (that came back to bite me when they started school) and all was right with the world. That’s when we decided to have our third baby. I mean by the third we should get a great sleeper right? And a girl? Right? Only an idiot would think that the established trend of producing not such great sleepers and boys would change.

Our third little blessing arrived with worse sleeping habits than the other two put together. We didn’t know what hit us and eventually resorted to keeping the little guy in the bed with us in a desperate attempt to get some sleep. Three years down the line he still spends half the night in our bed, but at this point I am beyond stressing about it. You see I eventually came to an epiphany. I realised that stressing about getting sleep and getting the kids to sleep on their own made everything unbearable, miserable and grumpy. I decided to give up fighting because clearly we had lost the war a long time ago. The war had in fact, obliterated us. Like a nuclear bomb. After all for every sleepless night there is always a cup of milky coffee in the morning. Sleep is overrated anyway.

Oh and a king size bed helps too.