Help! My Child Won't Sleep...

When the Very Small Boy really was still Very Small, to say that he "wasn't a very good sleeper" was putting it mildly. As a newborn, suffering from colic and reflux, he would wake to feed every two hours through the night, and was never at any stage able to nap during the day for more than 45 minutes in one stretch. I used to think that if only I could get four hours of uninterrupted sleep, I would be able to function. And (as I think we all do when we have a small baby), I obsessed relentlessly about his sleep, and was completely fixated on that eternal question: When Will He Sleep Through The Night?

It pains me to say it, but as of yet, my question remains unanswered: the Very Small Boy rarely sleeps through the night, and when he does, the price we pay is incredibly early waking. At three years and three months of age, my child remains a terrible sleeper and DH and I remain chronically sleep deprived; and although my daydream of enjoying a four-hour stretch of night-time sleep was realised a long time ago, it was way too little, and far too late.

On the rare occasions when the Very Small Boy "sleeps through", he will wake the following morning at some time between five and six. The early waking is more bearable during summer, when it is often light at that time of day; every winter for the last three years, I have been regularly woken suddenly from deep sleep around 5.30am and been forced to endure the ceaseless wailings of a Small Angry Person for up to three hours and in semi-darkness. It's not a particularly cheerful start to the day. It is, in fact, akin to the kind of torture that hardened terrorists are expected to crack under.

I consider anything beyond 6.00am to be a lie-in, but this is usually preceded by the kind of night where I am woken suddenly, randomly and without reason or warning anything up to to five times. As one can imagine, nature of this kind of night waking prevents DH and I from being able to relax when the Very Small Boy actually is asleep; the threat of being woken hanging over us like a grand piano above a couple of unwitting cartoon characters.

Admitting to the world that your child has a sleep problem is rather like outing yourself with some kind of embarrassing affliction. Most people (mercifully for them) haven't experienced the level of chronic awfulness that having a child who won't sleep brings, and are unable to understand or empathise with the level of insanity that ongoing sleep-deprivation causes. All of us, in the first few months of a baby's life, are prepared for night waking: a tiny baby needs to wake regularly to feed and we understand that we can get through this challenging time because it is both necessary and short-term. So understandably, those of us still dealing with night-waking at three years and beyond feel horribly cheated, and quite often unaccountably ashamed of our situations (and of the resentment we feel towards our sleep-challenged child).

The shame we feel is often compounded by well-meaning friends who offer up solutions which, by implication, make us feel responsible. "Put him to bed later"; "let him sleep in your room"; "tire him out during the day"; "be tougher on him" are all comments I hear often. But unfortunately it is oversimplifying the problem to suggest that I am to blame for being over-indulgent, or not nurturing enough. After all, I have two children, both of whom have the same routine and are loved in the same way and one of whom is a fantastic sleeper.

My personal take on it all? He got into some very bad sleep habits from birth onwards, due to the excessive discomfort of reflux and colic. He's intelligent and sensitive; he fears bad dreams and dislikes being alone in the dark in his bed. But beyond taking the middle ground of being loving but firm, a solution is beyond me. I am condemned, for now, to live in the shadowy, surreal half-world between day and night, sleeping and waking: the permanent abode of the chronically sleep-deprived.

Biscuit-Face

“Mummy, I want to give something up for lent!” declared the Small Girl this afternoon as she and her Very Small brother played whilst I tidied up her bedroom. “Oh!” I replied. “OK darling, what would you like to give up?” 
“Ummmm... sweets!” she said.
“OK... but you know that you have to give them up for forty days?”
“Fourteen days?”
"No darling, forty days...”
“But am I not allowed to have any at all for forty days?”
“No... what would you do on a Friday afternoon when Teacher offers the class a jelly each for Being Good?”

Tears welled up in the Small Girl's eyes.
“But that's not fay-ur!” she exclaimed, wiping her eyes with a sleeve.
“Well, perhaps we ought to be more realistic about what you give up. But it's not supposed to be easy darling” I explained gently. “Do you know the story behind lent? The bible story of how Jesus went into the desert?”
“yes...” she said hesitantly
“Well, that's the whole idea behind lent; that you give up something that's difficult for you to give up and that makes you think of the hard thing Jesus did when he went into the desert for forty days and nights: it reminds you of the suffering he went through”

The Small Girl nodded thoughtfully to herself before declaring:
“I think I'll give up tidying my room!”
I sighed and turned on the vacuum.

Twenty minutes later, her bedroom pink and sparkling, I found the Small Girl playing a game with her brother in his bedroom.
"Mum? Tomorrow's pancake day!" she said excitedly
"Yes I know, it's Shrove Tuesday, which is when we use up all the nice things in the cupboard to make pancakes - because we know that after that it will be lent and we'll be giving stuff up"
"Did Jesus eat all the stuff in his cupboards before he went into the desert?" she asked
"No, that's just what we do darling" I laughed, and put my arm around her for a cuddle.

“Why don't you give up biscuits for lent?” I suggested. “You could still have cake... and I could give up biscuits too, so we'd be doing it together”
“OK!” she agreed. “And would he do it too?” she asked, pointing to her brother as he sat on his bed, swinging his legs.
“Ummm... well probably not” I conceded “you can't make someone do it really”.

“Pootle?” she asked, turning to her brother “Do you want to give up biscuits for forty days?”
He looked at her as if she were completely insane; not even bothering to reply before slipping off the edge of his bed and onto the carpet, where an assortment of colourful Power Rangers were in the throes of a Very Small Battle.

Jesus Christ

“What would you like for breakfast Mister?” I asked the Very Small Boy yesterday morning at 6.00am as we stumbled blearily into the dark kitchen. “Sugar!” he cried, shielding his eyes and wincing as I switched on the light, before adding “with Weetabix”, then changing his mind “No, no – jam!... with toast”

“Mummy, who are you?” he asked me five minutes later as he tucked into his toast and I gingerly sipped my comfortingly large and very strong coffee. This is just the latest in the endless string of difficult – and often unanswerable – questions fired at me recently by the Small People.

It all began, predictably enough, over Christmas, with the question “Mummy, is Santie real?”. The discussion that sprang from this reasonable-enough enquiry (“he's not actually a real person, but he is real in our imaginations”) led to a whole host of “is it real? ” questions (“Are you real?”; “Is this pasta real?”), which eventually, to my relief, led to a thorough understanding of the concept of “real”; by the time the New Year rolled around, further interrogation was no longer necessary.

“Mummy, is that whale real?” asked the Very Small Boy after Christmas, pointing to the television where “Free Willy” was cavorting damply across the screen.
“Well, that's a real whale” I replied, “but the story is just a made-up story and the people are just actors”
“But, what's that whale's name?” he persisted, looking at me intently.
“Errr... Willy” I replied, bracing myself
“Aaaaaaahahahahhaaaaa” the Very Small Boy fell to the floor, clutching his sides and rolling around, laughing hysterically. Then he sat up again and looked seriously at me.
“No but really Mummy: what's his real name?”

Walking back from Big School yesterday afternoon, the Small Girl too was full of questions:
“Mummy?” she asked
“Yes Sausage?” I replied.
“What lives longer, a camel or a polar bear?”

I thought for a minute, before replying “I have absolutely no idea, we'll have to ask Daddy's iphone” (the mysterious and magical Daddy's iphone being the definitive voice on even the most unanswerable of the Small People's questions)

She considered this briefly and then asked “Mummy, do you believe in Jesus?”.
“Ummm...” I stalled, taken aback (my mind still on the camels vs polar bears problem)
“Well, yes Darling: I believe that Jesus was a man who lived a long time ago, and that the Bible tells the stories from his life”. The Small Girl had skipped ahead as I was speaking.
“But I don't really believe in the magic stuff” I added quietly, and she stopped and looked suddenly up at me.
“I believe in the magic stuff” she said, nodding her head thoughtfully to herself.

“Well that's just fine” I said “because what people believe in is a very personal thing, and it's something that we each have to decide for ourselves; only you can decide what you believe”. I took her hand and squeezed it reassuringly and together, we walked back home pushing the Very Small Boy, who had fallen asleep in his pushchair; his favourite Batman figure clutched tight in his grubby little fist.