sleep Archives – Mummascribbles

As some of you know, on Saturday we changed Zach’s cot into a bed, gave him his big boy duvet and his big boy pillow and hoped for the best. You can see the previous post here but I thought I’d give a little update as a couple of people mentioned they’d be keeping an eye to see how we get on.

Of course, it is still early days but I am pleased to report that it has so far been a success. I won’t say that getting him to sleep has been a huge amount easier – we have managed to get him asleep by about 8pm for the last two nights and it did just take me until 8.30 tonight but we are also trying to work out his daytime nap which could be affecting things! He still takes a while to stop turning over, asking us to do this and that and asking to see the book we are reading to him, basically anything to try and stay awake! Eventually, he settles and falls asleep. The good news is that he has pretty much stayed where he is when he is asleep. He did do an amazing roll out on Saturday night; he slid down onto his hands, almost into a handstand and slowly made it fully onto the floor. By the time I got upstairs to assist him, he was already snuggling to get comfy on the carpet! And so far, that is the only roll out of bed! He has kept the covers on him for the majority of the time and is pretty much sleeping through the night (he woke up early this morning but that’s not unusual!). He looks so snug under his duvet and he seems to really like his ‘new’ bed – he especially likes being able to get in all by himself and get himself under the covers.

The only downside of this transition is that while he is still sleeping brilliantly, I have been waking in the middle of the night paranoid that I’m going to find him on the floor! I have a monitor in our room and when I wake in the pitch black, I quickly plug it in so I can take a peek at him and as usual, he is fine! Hopefully I’ll start sleeping through again once I am comfortable with him being a lot more free at night! I’m turning into a bit of a zombie again!

At the moment, I can say that we definitely made the right decision but there is still time for it to all go wrong. It’s looking positive right now though and hopefully sometime soon, he won’t need us in his room to get him to sleep!

Well today has been another big day in our house…today we changed Zach’s cot into a bed!! I don’t know if it’s the right thing to have done but he was really starting to dislike being trapped behind the bars of the cot and bedtime has been a nightmare for a few weeks now so it made sense to give it a go.

Last week I spent hours trawling the Internet trying to find a duvet and pillow, and trying to find suitable bedding. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is finding non expensive 100% cotton bedding sets. Most I came across were a good £50-60 which considering it’s a toddler bed set is gross! I don’t even pay that amount for our kingsize! Because Zach suffers with eczema I try and keep everything to pure cotton as it’s more breathable for his little skin.

I eventually found a nice set in mothercare and another nice set from a company called Baroo for not too much money. I also managed to find a duvet and pillow from Asda that was 100% cotton and was really chuffed with that little find as I’d convinced myself that was not going to be completely cotton!

All deliveries arrived by Thursday so I got them all washed and dried for today’s transition!

He was upstairs with us while we were changing his bed around and was very excited about it. He had a little tester and kept saying Zach go to bed, turn the light out, turn the stars on but it wasn’t bedtime then! It was actually dinner time!

And so this evening he had his bath, got in his pyjamas and went to his big boy bed with his big boy duvet and his big boy pillow. He fidgeted just as much as he did in his cot, and bearing in mind he’s had no nap today, he still fought sleep – not for quite as long as he has been but he fought it.

At the moment, we seem to just have a toddler who doesn’t want to fall asleep and miss out on anything, and who equally needs at least one parent there until he’s asleep!

What is easier for us now that he doesn’t have bars up is that we can lean on his bed and read him a story and we don’t get our arms stuck while we are stroking his hand!

As I write, he did cave into sleep and I can see he is fast asleep. Let’s just hope he doesn’t roll out or kick the covers off! At least we got a decent lie in this morning if that is the case!

Wish us luck with our latest development, I’m sure I’ll be back in a few days with an update!! In the meantime, feel free to pass on your cot to bed stories and any advice you have for getting a not wanting to go to sleep toddler, to sleep!!

Here’s the little munchkin testing out his bed earlier!!

Having been fans of The Gro Company since Zach was a small baby, I jumped at the chance of reviewing one of their Gro Clocks. I’ve heard all about them and a friend of mine had recently posted on Facebook about how wonderful they are. Zach was also going through a stage of waking up early and whilst during the week that’s fine as we both work, we really, really wanted something to help us get a lay in at the weekend!

About the clock

The Gro Clock is designed to help children know when it’s time to wake up. It has set stages: when it’s not in use, it simply shows the time which is great for older children learning to tell the digital time.

When it’s time to go to bed, you select the night-time setting, the screen darkens and it then has a faceful of stars round the edge of a giant star.

When the morning comes (whichever time you’ve set the clock to), the screen turns yellow and shows a big smiling sunshine.

If your child wakes up at 5am and the clock is not set to show the sun until 8am, they can see that it is still night-time and that they should go back to sleep. Throughout the night, the stars go out one by one which helps them if they do wake up as they can see how close they are to it being morning. The clock has two setting options for either nap-time and bedtime or weekday/weekend timings. The clock comes with a fun bedtime book which helps to encourage children to stay in bed longer and it also has an alarm that can be set for older children having to get up for school! It is mains powered and suitable from two years of age.

What we think of the Gro Clock
I wasn’t really sure when the best time to introduce the clock to Zach really was. I wanted him to be used to it so that we could get lie in’s over the Christmas break so we set it up shortly before the holidays and kept telling him about the stars and the sun to get the purpose of it into his head. At the start of the holidays, he decided that he wanted extra sleep anyway and so the sun was always on when he woke up. Towards the end of the holidays he’s been ill and all sleep patterns go out of the window then!

He wasn’t hugely bothered about it at the beginning which I sort of expected. Over the last couple of weeks of using it, he has started to understand it more and it is now a part of his little bedtime routine. When we take him upstairs to bed, he says to us, turn the stars on! He is starting to understand the sun part of it and so I’m hoping that we have brought it into use at the perfect time. We are back to work on Monday and so will have the weekday/weekend settings in use and hopefully we can have some lovely weekend lie ins.

Sadly, Zach is always a bit upset when he wakes up in the night and so we tend to have to go in and see to him but I hope with time, he becomes a bit calmer and falls back to sleep without the need for us and that’s when the clock will really come into play. I definitely think that it takes a little while for them to understand exactly what the clock is about and so I wouldn’t expect miracles to happen overnight with your newly two year old but if it’s used every day, it shouldn’t take long for them to get used to it.

Is there anything we don’t like?
Errrm, honestly, no. They’ve pretty much thought of everything with this product. I just asked the other half if there is anything negative he can think of and his response was that it would be cool for it to have an alarm on it – which it does, he just didn’t know! That was all he could come up with and it was already factored into the clock! It’s also really easy to set up which is a big bonus!

The Gro Clock retails for £29.99 at The Gro Company although is currently on sale for £24.99 (as of 2nd January 2015).

Disclaimer
We were sent the Gro Clock for the purpose of this review but all opinions and words are my own.

Something the other half and I ask ourselves on a regular basis is will we ever not be tired again? I was sitting at my desk the other day and I was really struggling to stay awake and yet I’d had a fairly decent sleep. We got a couple of really decent sleeps in at the weekend compared to normal and yet we still didn’t feel refreshed. The other night, I had to go back upstairs to settle Zach so he’d go to sleep and when I went back downstairs, the other half had fallen asleep on the sofa. It was 8.40pm!

Anything after 10.30pm is considered as a late night now. Beyond 11pm is a) rare and b) exhausting.

Most nights we are in bed before 10.30, most nights Zach sleeps through, and yet when that alarm goes off at 5.45am I feel shattered, despite having had 7 hours sleep.

The night before last I stayed in a London hotel as I had a very early start for an event. We took the board and ourselves out to a late dinner and I was horrified when everyone stood up to leave and I realised it was midnight! Not only that but I knew my alarm would be going off at 5.30! The worst part was despite being knackered, I woke up at 3am!

Last night Zach woke up at 1am and then it must have been about 3am that he requested to go back in his cot. Then the alarm went off at 5.50.

This morning I am exhausted. I just saw this picture appear on Facebook and I can definitely say that I am currently at the knock out stage. And somehow, I don’t know how but somehow, I need to stay awake at my desk again today!

Is anyone else absolutely blimmin exhausted – you must be, it can’t just be us!!

Every now and then, toddlers like to throw something into the mix when you’d got it all sussed.

Zach hasn’t had a problem going to bed for a long time. He’s been in his new room a week now and we’ve had no major set backs – a little bit of whimpering and in there (whilst pointing to our bedroom), and one night he did end up in our bed when he woke in the night, but relatively speaking, bedtime has been a pleasure for a while now.

So last night he decided to throw a spanner in the works by crying. Lots. Generally, if he does whimper when he’s put in his cot, he’s usually stopped before we’ve made it back downstairs so I knew last night when he was standing up in his cot crying his little eyes out, that we were in for a tricky evening.

The other half went back up first. I could see him on the monitor trying to calm him down and soothe him in the cot. I think he took him out for a cuddle. I could hear Zach chattering away like it wasn’t night time and upon being put back in his cot again he proceeded to cry again. Lots! The other half came back downstairs because sometimes having daddy in the room keeps him more awake!

Cue mummy!

I made sure I pee’d first because I’ve made that mistake so many times. Never go to settle your child with a full bladder because you may be in for the long haul!

Up I went and into his room where he instantly calmed down and started talking to me. He told me that Eeyore (one of his cuddlies), was asleep and I told him that Zach needed to be asleep but he was adamant that it was only Eeyore that was asleep! I could see that he was not going to lay down and so I asked him if he would like to sit with me on his bench and have a cuddle. Of course he did. So out he got and we went and sat down, him laying in my arms.
Suddenly I was transported back a year to when he was tiny and I could only get him to sleep through pure comfort. Last night, just like back then, I told him the story of Cinderella (because it’s the only damn story I can remember by heart), I sang to him while rocking him – Twinkle Twinkle no longer works as he can sing it all now so just joins in, so I tried Frere Jacques over and over and over again and it worked. Suddenly my little wide awake boy was letting his eyelids drop and slowly but surely, he fell asleep in my (now rather dead) arms. Had my right arm not have been going numb, I would have happily sat there enjoying this beautiful moment for longer but alas, I had to put him back in his cot and he half woke up to tell me the names of all the Raa Raa characters on his wall and that Eeyore was asleep, before he was shushed back to sleep again for the night.

Three things came out of last night.

1. No matter how much we think we have things set, they will always throw it up in the air now and again and it is always a worry that it’s the start of a bad sequence of bedtimes – I’ll only know the answer to that tonight but I think a few things caused his unwilling to go to bed last night, all of which were our own doing and so fingers crossed when we put him to bed tonight, he’ll nod off as easily as he has for months.

2. No matter how much he doesn’t see me, no matter how much he tests and pushes me, no matter how much he sometimes pushes me away, I am still the mummy that I was back when he was at home with me full time. I will still devote every minute that I need to, in giving him the cuddles he needs, the comfort that soothes him, the knowledge that I love him to the moon and back.

3. This morning, when the mad Monday morning rush was happening, when he didn’t wake up until 10 minutes before we had to rush out the door, when the total time I have spent with him so far today is half an hour (and that’s only because we got stuck in traffic), I am so grateful that he needed my comfort to get to sleep last night. So grateful that I had an extra half an hour of his beautiful sleepy snuggles. So grateful that at that moment I felt completely needed by my darling boy. Because sometimes it feels like I’m not. Sometimes it feels like it wouldn’t matter if I wasn’t there. But I think that’s how he deals with me being the one that is forever leaving him somewhere. I think it’s a bit of a barrier that he puts up in case I don’t come back.

Therefore, the next time he takes a while to go to sleep, I will remember that every extra sleepy snuggly second is one worth treasuring, because they really don’t happen very often anymore!

I know that when I’m on my way up to bed and Zach wakes up that it’s going to be one where he refuses to continue sleeping in his cot! Usually when this happens, he comes into our bed and when he’s deep asleep we pop him back where he should be!

Last night he woke up, the difference this time however was that he was absolutely inconsolable. I have no idea why. I wish he was old enough to tell me but he was in such a state it was actually heartbreaking. I sat on the bed with him (which didn’t go down well, he liked me standing) and just hugged him until he stopped crying and snuggled into me.

I shuffled over so I could lean against the headboard which made him start up again before he snuggled into me again.

We were like that for a while until he nodded off on me and I was nodding off to. At this point, he rolled himself off of me into the middle of the bed!

When my other half came to bed, he tried to transfer him to the cot…fail! Zach screamed again and was quickly put back in bed where he wriggled over to me and fell asleep snuggled up with me.

It was a rough night but goodness I got the best cuddles that I’ve had from him for ages!

There was a point when he was a baby where every night he would only sleep on me. This was as close as I got to being back at that most precious time of co-sleeping.

I didn’t appreciate the rough night…

I haven’t appreciated working through tiredness today but you know what…

It was totally worth it for those cuddles!