It seems like everywhere you look lately, there is more news about just how important sleep is for your health, your career, your wellbeing – your sanity! There are new books popping up every day about how to get more sleep, and Arianna Huffington even left the huge media platform she started, which bears her name, to concentrate on a start up that focuses on wellness and, to a large degree, helping people to see just how important sleep is.
But what if you have a small person in your house who no longer appears to like sleep? Who wakes up in the middle of the night at least once a night to call you into their room. What if they want to hold your hand when they go back to sleep, which is wonderful and lovely apart from the fact that it leaves you lying on their cold floor with your eyes wide open in the dark, hoping that sleep will come over you.
And what if you decide not to hold their hand, or if your husband volunteers to lie on the floor, and you are left lying in your bed listening to them cry for you, both miserable and wide awake. And what if you decide to bring them into bed with you, but they wriggle and roll around and kick your husband in the head, and insist on lying flat on top of your pregnant stomach, making you lie awake thinking about how they might be squashing the baby inside of you?
What if, when your tiny person DOES sleep through the night, your stupid pregnancy body wakes you up every two hours to pee?
What if, because of the first pregnancy, and the small person and the next pregnancy, and the imminent arrival of another small person, you work out that you won’t have had a decent stretch of sleep (ie: more than one night at a time) for a minimum of FOUR YEARS, probably longer?
What then, Arianna? What then?
Any advice for surviving sleep deprivation / getting a toddler to realise they can go back to sleep without you / preparing for life with a toddler who wakes up in the night and a baby who’ll need feeding every two hours is MUCH APPRECIATED.
I never comment on stuff but this was so unbelievably like my experience that I had to!! My daughter was about 18 months and I was 8 months pregnant and we went through exactly what you describe. Now she is just over 2 and the baby is 6.5 months, they are sharing a room (as of last 2 weeks) and she isn’t waking at all, him just once a night for a feed at about 2am. There was some pretty intense sleep deprivation between now and then but it is really starting to improve (all to change soon again I expect!) so hang on in, it does get better!!! We didn’t really do anything in particular to help our daughter settle herself, she just one day seemed to do it and now chats to her brother and teddies instead of crying for me. Having a baby and a toddler is not easy but I swear i haven’t found anything harder than having a toddler, working and being pregnant! Now if I could just get them both to sleep past 6am I will be laughing! Good luck with it all, sounds like you are doing a great job with your little man!
Thanks Susan – a voice of hope!