I think everyone will have heard me say and is probably sick of the tales of Josh’s poor sleeping patterns… It’s not for the want of trying. We have an established routine and have had for a couple of years now albeit with a few tweaks here and there.

This and his eating habits at home are his Achilles heel. The eating thing we can probably take a bit of blame for to be honest. The sleep thing wares you down. 32 months in and I don’t think we have ever had a full week of even 7-6. He has always been an early riser but we have come to accept that, it’s when wake up is before 6 that it is more of an issue.. He wakes during the night too sometimes briefly, sometimes for longer periods of time. We had pondered a sleep trainer several times but then would get an ‘OK’ week and put it off.  You expect it from a newborn but at nearly 3 it gets a little tedious.

These last few weeks have been particularly bad, probably since the dodie has gone. My husband who did for a time primarily put him down was reading him up to 8 booked a night!!!! He would then sit on ‘the chair’ until he dropped off. This formed bad habits.. The request for sitting on the chair became commonplace. I got it down to 3 books and would sit briefly on the chair but this was with a lot of tears and calling out. We persevered and most nights then he would drop off, even if it was a long process. Then one night after a week of 5am starts and frequent night waking we had ‘the apocalypse’. He was demented, the requests to sit on ‘the chair’ hit fever pitch. We never really get angry at him but we were at the end of our tether. It was decided it was time to say goodbye to ‘the chair’ and so it got removed from what had been its resting place since before he was born.. Then came requests to sit of the floor-he’s a smart cookie-he knows there is more than 1 way to skin a cat 😉. I’m kind of laughing now but 25 weeks pregnant, Ian early rising and unusually bad behaviour from Josh probably due to overtiredness had us withered. Thankfully ‘ga ga’ took him for a couple of hours on Saturday and plans went awry and we slept solidly to catch up. 

We have now introduced a sleep chart with ‘prizes’ at the end of every week.. We can live in sleep deprived hope that this might crack the bad habits and if we get back to 8-6 we are happy and less exhausted to boot!