Sleepless Nights and a New Bed!!!!

I was going to put about ten more exclamation points in the title of this post - I am that excited. I'll start off by saying I love sleeping and love being in my bed. It's by far the hardest thing about having had a baby, the lack of sleep and the fact that opportunities for lie-ins are thin on the ground. In saying that, I do spend a good bit of time with J in our bed. In the morning he will often have a nap about 1.5 hours after he wakes up (very strange, if you ask me) so in the morning sometimes we stay in bed and play for a while and then he goes back asleep, giving me time to lie next to him and go online or grab a quick nap myself.

J is a very bad sleeper. There's no other way to put it. The idea that he will ever sleep through the night seems crazy to me, I just can't picture it ever happening, although as has been pointed out to me by a few people, no 18 year old wakes up 6 times at night needing his mother! I know they have a point but at the moment I feel like I am in a constant state of exhaustion, like a foggy cloud of sleepiness that I seem to exist in. I always had a good memory and picked up things quickly but lately my senses seems a bit dulled and I find myself become forgetful and disorganised. I never really had "baby brain" when I was pregnant but it is definitely kicking in now. He doesn't need to be fed or changed during the night (he refuses food) and he is neither too hot nor too cold. He just wakes up and lacks the ability to go back asleep by himself.

Recently, our solution when he wakes up at night  is to just bring him into the bed with us, instead of rocking him in the dark for two hours singing Five Little Ducks (I am really starting to hate those ducks, there may be a duck cull coming up in our future). A few people (including my Mum) have said just do what you need to do to get some sleep and to take the path of least resistance.

When J was younger all the SIDS advice used to scare the crap out of me. I thought if I took him in the bed with us he would just die immediately, on the spot. I was terrified. Now, I have mellowed a bit and just take some precautions to make sure he is not smothered by us or a duvet.

Our bed is not very big so when he comes in with us Mr HNW usually moves to J's bedroom and sleeps on the floor on a little fold out mattress type thing. Also, bad mammy alert here - the cat sleeps at the end of our bed too so often there are actually four of us in the bed. Recently I'd had enough and decided we had to have a king-size bed so we would all be a bit more comfortable.

We had a bit of a shop around and decided to buy it in good old Ikea. Some of the prices for beds were shocking. I know a bed is an investment but we are on a budget here! We bought a Malm Ottoman bed because I loved the idea of having all that storage under the bed. It is just fabulous and I'm loving have all the extra space in the bed. After years of renting  it's also nice having a bed that you have bought yourself and you know that nobody else had slept in. It's always nice to get to buy new bedlinen too!

What's even better is all the storage under the bed (notice the obligatory cat photo):

Great for those of us in apartments. I'm still organising but look at all the space for bags, shoes and scarves. Now I can buy more!

Fingers crossed this leads to a better nights sleep for all of us - and on that note I'm off to get into my lovely bed now and catch some Zs while I can!

N
xxx