The Bedtime Parade

Okay, so I get it, babies don't sleep, children don't sleep, adults don't sleep, if all the reassuring comments I've heard over the last two years to go by, NOBODY sleeps.

But we all know that is not quite true. People do sleep, maybe they wake up during the night but on the most part they do sleep, there's just usually some kind of strategy to manage it. Well, hell, I have NO STRATEGY. Mainly because my child has zero chill when it comes to sleeping but also because everytime we try something and it works, we do it again the next day and it doesn't. So I would like to share with you something I like to call "The Bedtime Parade"

The Bedtime Parade was a phrase I started using when Bird was quite small. I would literally spend hours settling this screechy little baby and it became almost a joke- why would this kid not just calm down and go to sleep?! Answer is because she was a tiny baby and babies do whatever they like and care for NOTHING except their own needs and wishes (...wait, you mean like adults..?!) But anyway, this farcical bedtime 'routine' became known as The Bedtime Parade.

The Parade escalated as Bird got older and by the time she was 1 it was beyond a joke. I instilled 'Tea, Bath, Story, Milk, Bed' really early on and have always tried to stick to it in an effort to at least be trying to parent like a grown up but this loose routine would, could, and still sometimes does go on for hours.

Up until I stopped feeding her I would be sitting up there with a tit flopped out for so long that by the time she was asleep I felt like I may as well give up on the day and go to bed too. This meant I was generally quite aggy and resentful towards anyone else in the whole world that had a life past 7pm. My life was dull, I was depressed, my husband was downstairs alone watching a million movies and I became completely consumed by trying to get my kid to just go the fuck to sleep. Stay asleep? Do not be so silly mumma, this child won't sleep through until she is 23 months and dosed up with a cold...!

A big turning point for me was moving house this past August.
In our previous house Bird had her own room with a cot in it and yet still slept in our room. Now, do not get me wrong I am a huuuuge supporter of (safe) co sleeping and we have bed shared with Bird since she was about 10 months old. Prior to that, she was 'slept' in a next to me crib/ on my chest while I sat there wild eyed and panicking I was going to drop and smother my child.
 But moving house was a game changer. I saw it as an opportunity to reset things a little bit and try something new.

So, into her own room she went. It started off as such baby steps (for me more than her I think!) We would do The Bedtime Parade in my room and then I would lift her sleeping into her cot and ninja myself away. Then, over time, we shifted to a new way of doing things, and this was when night weaning came into play (which I can write a seperate post about if people would like?) because The Bedtime Parade became a team activity and my husband was so much more involved. It made a huge difference to the way things were happening and a huge difference to the way I felt.
As she night weaned the routine became supper, bath, stories, milk (if she asked for it) and then into her room to have some gentle songs and the kid only went and started falling asleep in her own bed!!! It got better when she completely weaned because it gave me even more freedom.

As you can imagine I'm loving life at this point getting all smug thinking that I've cracked it, well I haven't. Child still doesn't sleep through the night, occasionally she will, but we are still trying to work out the right way to do The Parade. Every night at some point Bird comes into my bed, star fishing out, kicking me so hard in the back I feel like her foot is going to come out my chest, generally scrabbling around like a spider and making her presence known but actually, the older she gets the more she under stands "Move Over!"

I know "this wont be forever" right? Well actually, it absolutely will! I read a lovely story recently about teenagers needing their parents in the night and it made me think that actually this life is not just 'mum life while she's small', it's 'mum life for life' and I will always hug this kid, support this kid, do whatever I can to make her feel lovely inside because why would I not? Sometimes what I can do might be less than what I could do the day before but I will always give it a damn good go.

I will always have The Bedtime Parade, it just might be that when she is older, I don't have to do it with her, surely we all have our own bedtime parades and routines, even as adults? What's your own Bedtime Parade? What do you have to do before you go to bed? I mean, last night Annora had to have two dummies (one for her mouth and one for her hand), three stories, six rounds of The Greatest Showman's Million Dreams (sung by yours truely), a thousand miniscule sips of water and a short but rather pleasant conversation about Barnaby at school...