Sleep, who needs sleep?

Apologies for not having posted for a little while, I've been tired. The mouse has been exhausting Lord Vader and I. The thing is she is yet to master the whole concept of sleeping through. Of course, I don't blame her, I blame Lord Vader and I. You see whilst we have always put her in her own cot for her night time sleep, she usually wakes around 1-1:30 in the morning for a feed. I don't think she actually needs the feed any more and its more of a comfort thing but regardless she wakes. This means one of us has to get out of bed and stumble to fetch her and bring her back to bed. Inevitably I, ill equipped for the task, fall asleep quite quickly after such an event, and Lord Vader is way to comfy and snug to dream of moving to return the mouse to her cot, therefore she snuggles in with us. 

There is something wonderful about cuddling a baby in your own bed. Something blissfully peaceful as if all is right with the world, until of course she kicks you in the face....... or fights your cuddle to escape, or crawls on your head, or tries to dive off the bed, or just cries because she's tired and doesn't want to sleep. All these things, tend to make a peaceful sleep impossible. 

It reminds me of a story read by Noni Hazlehurst:

Last week the mouse slept in her own bed through to 4am. She almost made it to 'sleeping through'. A couple more hours and she would have nailed it. I'll cop waking at 6am. You see the other two kids were good sleepers, the boy in particular still is, so we have always been able to sleep through to at least 7, until now. 

It got me thinking, "I really enjoyed that whole sleeping uninterrupted thing." so I decided to do something about it.

This week we've started to not feed her at 1 am and just get her back to sleep in her own bed. So when she wakes one of us (usually me) will go to her, rewrap her, and rock her to sleep. Thankfully its usually only 15 minutes and then she is fast asleep. The first two days she also woke at 4am and couldn't be rocked back to sleep after 40 minutes of trying so, fed up, I've dumped her on Lord Vader and then collapsed into a snoring heap. But at least she's learning to get to 4am.

Last night was, I'm hoping, a revelation. The mouse slept through to 5am; a new record! I didn't even hear her this time, and Lord Vader went to get her. I'm not sure if it was out of sympathy (very doubtful), or whether the lure of the spare bedroom, being so much closer to the cutest ones bedroom than our room, was irresistible to the exhausted wife. But she never made it back to our room, so I slept very peacefully. I'm very grateful to her, trust me.

It'll be interesting to see if this actually works, and if it does, how long it will take. I'll let you know.