Mummascribbles – A new factor in mummy guilt! – Mummascribbles

I have felt a lot of mummy guilt over the last two and a bit years of being back at work. There has (and still is) the guilt of leaving him at nursery when he cries and asks for ‘all the cuddles’ to delay me in leaving. There has been the guilt when he’s been feeling a bit poorly and I have to weigh up whether he’s poorly enough for me to need to stay home with him. And there has been the guilt when I have had to wake him up in order to drag him out of the house in his pyjamas when he isn’t ready to wake up.

Now?? There’s a new guilt that I am having to contend with. The guilt of the time we get home.

It was never a problem before. We would get home just before seven and he’d have half an hour of playtime before we’d go up to bed and he’d be asleep somewhere between eight to eight thirty. That is late in terms of some children’s bedtime but it wasn’t affecting him.

So what happened?

He dropped his lunchtime nap. Meaning that on most days, he doesn’t sleep during the day, bar maybe the odd 20 minute power nap. This of course has pro’s and con’s. The pro’s being that on most nights it only takes him a matter of minutes to fall asleep, whereas previously it would take him at least half an hour. The cons though, they would be the fact that quite often he falls asleep in the car on the way home from mum’s house and then has to be transferred straight to bed without spending any real quality time with me or his daddy and having that brief moment of him screaming the house down because he wants to stay snuggled up in his car seat, that he realises it’s only 7pm which means he is missing out on fun time but that at the same time, he wants to be asleep.

Apologies for the quality of this photo but you get the gist!

Honestly, last night was a nightmare. Not only did he fall asleep but I had forgotten to take his pyjama bottoms to mum’s (she always gets him ready for bed for me) so I had to battle changing him when we got home. I took him straight up to bed but from the instant that I took him from the car seat he was screaming and thrashing around. But then he woke up enough to want to do his advent calendar and have some water and ended up not falling asleep until gone 8. Which was far too late considering he was so exhausted.

The fact of the matter is, he needs to be asleep around 7pm. That would be the ideal time for him to be in bed and nodding off but it is absolutely impossible without it being because he’s fallen asleep in the car. I am even having him nodding off on the five minute journey home from nursery at 6pm. He is so tired in the evening and I feel like the worst mother because it is our fault that he can’t go to bed earlier. The other half has an hour and a half commute and doesn’t walk in the door until gone seven. I have pretty much an hour and a half trip as well by the time I’ve done the commute and picked him up and don’t tend to walk in the door until just before seven. There is of course nothing we can do right now and that’s what makes it all the more frustrating. I wish we could afford for me to drop just one hour from my working day. I’m not sure my company would even allow it and we just can’t really do it anyway. But that hour would enable me to get home and get him into bed at a decent time. I feel like it’s just not fair on him for him to keep falling asleep in the car and being exhausted eating his tea after nursery when it’s not his fault that we have to work full time hours.

A tired munchkin after nursery

How do you other working mum’s out there manage to get your little ones to bed at the time they need to go?  Or like Zach, do they have to suffer the consequences of it?

*** In the mere hours between writing this post and publishing it, I picked Zach up from nursery and they informed me that he slept…at quarter to ruddy four…for a sodding hour! Do you think I could get him to sleep tonight?!!! 45 minutes it took! Maybe falling asleep in the car is a better alternative hehe!