Bed hopping

Before I get on to the subject of sleep, and the lack thereof, I just have to tell you that today in the park, little man rubbed two sticks together and declared that he had made fire. No idea where that has come from. I think he's been secretly watching Ray Mears.

Anyway, sleep. I like it. A lot of it. Pre-child I would happily go to bed at 9pm and get up around 7am. Then there was all the usual baby shenanigans. At ten months, he 'slept through' for the first time and gradually started to do so quite reliably. For months - maybe seven or eight. I allowed myself to be lulled into a false sense of security, congratulate myself for never having considered any sleep training methods when he was a baby and came to believe that he would continue to sleep twelve hours straight for ever.

Yeah, right. He's a toddler. He still has one tooth to come. He's learning to talk. He's trying to work out what it's all about. It being the meaning of life and other momentous issues such as why mummy's bracelets always fall off his arm. Sometimes he wakes up thirsty. Usually he just wants a cuddle, and who can blame him? That's why I'm all for co-sleeping, in theory.

Unfortunately, he's fidgety and I'm a light sleeper, which is not a good combination. And I find that a tired mummy is one less able to remain patient in the face of toddler upsets and pestering. So after a few months of putting up with his arrival in my bed in the middle of the night, I've started returning him to his own bed. A couple of times he has bounced straight back up again, but he hasn't yet persisted enough to turn it into an issue. In general, I try to avoid anything becoming an 'issue' because you only start worrying about it and questioning what you're doing wrong. So we'll see how the current approach goes. And I'll try to go to bed early too, just in case.