David slept through the night from three months. This is not something you should ever share with fellow parents of three month olds.
We did nothing special. It is highly possible that he did wake up and we were so tired that we just slept through it, but it stuck. We listened to our friends talk about the nightmares they were suffering with sleep issues and felt extremely sympathetic but couldn’t really empathise. Some of them did not have a full night’s sleep for two years!
However, things started to get weird, and we started to feel less smug.
When we first converted David’s cot into a single bed, he would listen to his bedtime stories in the bed and then once we had left, would take himself out of bed and sleep on the floor next to his bedroom door. We decided that allowing this to continue till adolescence was probably not good parenting, so we started a multi-step plan. First, we set up the travel cot in his room to move him away from the door. This was like a teepee and he eventually crawled in, but he was still basically sleeping on the floor. We next had to butcher the travel cot so that it would go over the top of the single bed and he finally slept off the floor.
The next step was to remove the butchered tent like cover and this we successfully did by moving house. A little drastic but it worked as we got him a bunk bed and he sleeps on the bottom, near the floor.
As David has got older, our 12 hours of peace and quiet has been eroded from both ends. David comes in to see us as soon as the sun is up. To help, we purchased a clock that changes colour to show him when it is time to get up. David very kindly comes in to inform us that it hasn’t changed colour yet. He does understand the concept of lie ins and will remind us of whose turn it is to get up and pander to his every need. “Mummy, it’s your turn. It was daddy yesterday.” At bedtime, David has recently been unable to go to sleep unless I am in the room with him. I can hear wise parents everywhere shouting, “No! Don’t start that!”
Too late! Maybe we are (sorry – I am) pandering too much but that’s okay because it won’t be that long before he is a smelly, teenage boy who will not want me anywhere near his bedroom and as long as he needs me to help him sleep, I will be there.