Night time becomes a whole new world when you become a parent. There are so many issues with it, the main one being lack of sleep, that it becomes this feared part of the day when you have a newborn. Although it gets easier and you get more sleep the older they become, it still has its issues like a hungry toddler at bedtime that you have to contend with. Some nights can be bliss, some story times can remind you just why you became a parent in the first place, but other times you just crave a date night and the children to have a sleepover at Grandma's. As night time is such a big subject, I decided to dedicate a couple of blog posts to it. At the beginning of last month, I published a blog post; The A-Z of Night Time: Part One. Here, without further ado, is part two.
O. Ounce. A way parents measure how much sleep they got- "I didn't get an ounce of sleep last night"
P. Peace. This is something you will say, once the kids are sound asleep and you have finally wandered downstairs into the living room, where the sound of silence greets you. "Ah peace at last" SPOILER. This does not last long!
Q. Quiet- same principle as peace. Quiet at night is good but make the most of the bursts of when it happens as it does not last.
R. Routine. How strict is your routine? Do you have set times? Or just an order in which you do things? Each family is different. We usually do upstairs for bath/ wet wash, teeth, stories then silence until they fall asleep eventually. The key I think to a more settled bedtime in the evenings, is having a routine from an early age.
S. Sleep. Something parents don't get a lot of at night.
T. Time. Time is a funny thing at night, when you are doing night feeds the time seems to go so slowly at night. They're long but with not a lot of sleep involved. Then once they are toddlers time seems to whiz by at night and there's not enough hours for the sleep you need to catch up on.
U. Understanding. I don't think either parents nor child will ever get a hundred percent understanding of how bedtimes and nighttimes should work. It's just one of those things that changes throughout time. One night they sleep through and you can gloat via a very smug Facebook status, the next night they have you up and down more times than a yo yo.
V. Voice. The creepiest moments in a parents life is when small little voices talking in their sleep comes through on the monitor or when you hear a little one
next to your ear just as you are waking up.
W. Warmth. The best part of having children invade your bed is that you will always be warm, which is amazing on those cold winter nights, not so awesome when it's the middle of the summer and you're all sweaty.
X. Kisses to the children at night time are the sweetest thing, you just have to hope they don't wake them up!
Y. Yesterday. I always used to hate waking up, doing a feed then dwelling on everything that happened yesterday, I would then lay awake for ages until I realised there would be no point in going back to sleep as the next feed would be due. The thoughts of yesterday would not be my friend but that's the problem with night feeds, some just get you wide awake and thinking of random things.
Zzzz.
Do any of these relate to you and your little ones routines? Pop a comment below, I'd love to hear from you.
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