Relaxed Parents

Why do they wake up in the middle of night? Why is it that little things that are second nature to them at three in the afternoon become insurmountable, terrifying mountains at three in the morning? A lot of books or websites will tell you that they wake up fairly regularly and go back to sleep again without really noticing anything or that a lot of the noises and movements don’t involve waking at all. All of us sleep in cycles passing from deep (REM) to fairly light sleep over the course of about one and a half hours (an hour in newborns, according to Dr Spock) and toddlers are no exception. Or, in other words, when dudelet yells mummy in the middle of the night followed by dead silence, he probably hasn’t even woken up. Similarly when he sits up and lies down again, rotates lengthways and requests to go to the shops – it’s just his little brain decompressing from one day and gearing up for the next.

But there are plenty of occasions when waking up means yelling and screaming. The top ten at the moment seem to be:

1. Lost yellow dummy (invariably down the side of the bed. But I get an amazing glow of achievement when I magically produce it after he’s assumed it was gone forever and that he’d never be able to sleep again)
2. Lost blanket (at the end of his feet)
3. Lost bunny (fallen out of bed)
4. Light on
5. Light off
6. Orange light on
7. Orange light off
8. Orange light and bedroom light on or off in every possible combination
9. Wet bed (see detailed previous entries)
10. “I just want to talk to you!”

Of course, everything looks like an insurmountable mountain at three in the morning, whether you happen to be two and three quarters or forty something. Dudelet’s mountains are different from mine. My montains are generally looming budget deficits at work or the leaking roof. His tend to revolve around the inexplicable disappearance of his favourite yellow dummy. Who’s to say in the grand swirling mess of stars and dark matter that is the universe which of the two is the more important? If I take a long, cold look at my job, I’d probably go with the dummy.

One blessing is that monsters so far haven’t made much of an appearance. I suspect they’re probably scared of him. Or maybe the cats keep them away.

The biggest problem is getting him back to sleep after 6am which, basically, doesn’t happen very often. In terms of books, Doctor Spock isn’t much help on this one and neither is the usually reliable “Toddler Taming” (Christopher Green) which, having reviewed the usual behavioural issues (feeding problems, too much attention in the middle of the night, lack of routine…), tells us that some toddlers are early birds, some like to sleep in and some don’t like to sleep at all. Fantastic. I wish I was a doctor.

The good news is that there does seem to be an age aspect to this in that as dudelet’s moved from two to nearly three, he’s been prepared to at least try and go back to sleep until seven. Meanwhile though, it comes in waves of blissful sleep-throughs (where we still wake up thinking we’ve heard him and strings of, well, eventfulness.

Like last night. This is one of the times I really should consider my rule about minimal editing beyond spelling and grammar. Self-evidently, I didn’t…