After about 13 years of broken, interrupted sleep, I am pleased to report that I am finally through to the other side!! That’s right folks. All four of my kids are sleeping through (as much as can be expected), and always all in their own beds!!!

The sleep deprivation, obviously started with Chance. Aaaah I remember it as if it were just yesterday. My number one baby who just did not want to go through the night without a feed every 2-3 hours for the first year of his life. It. Was. Brutal. And it felt relentless. And well-meaning folk assured me it would pass. It didn’t feel like it would!!! But of course, once he hit one year old and I weaned him off the boob, the nights were a little less challenging. Still interrupted frequently, but certainly not as hard as that first year.

And then my little Quinny came along. What an absolute treasure of a baby she was. At a very young age (maybe eight weeks?) she found her thumb and became a self-soother and goodness what a difference that made! We went from rocking/patting Chance to sleep multiple times a day and night to just putting Quinn down, giving her a kiss and walking away!!!

She fed and slept like a trooper, but still the night feeds that are par for the course were ever present and the interruptions continued. Sure, I would get a “full night sleep” here and there, but that usually meant five or six hours if I was lucky, before my early riser (Chance) was up and ready to rumble by 6am every day.

And then along came Darby. Thankfully for the first year, he took after his big sister, not his big brother, thumb-sucking and all! He fed and slept beautifully, but by this stage I was dealing with frequent age-appropriate night-time bed wetting with four-year-old Chance, and so the fun and games continued…

Around the time we were starting to get better sleep, when Darby was about one year old, he has his first break out of eczema and started waking up frequently, scratching his feet and legs. It was really awful and suddenly we were back to very interrupted nights, which, after a few good months, hit me quite hard!

Thankfully Chance grew out of the night-time wetting, and we got Darby’s eczema under control before Julius came along when Darby was 2.5 years old. Incidentally, this must have been one of the only times Julius ever sucked his thumb (maybe Quinn popped it in for him to see if he liked it!) as it’s certainly not something I ever remember him doing!

This baby was an absolute delight and pure joy. He slept well and fed beautifully and the kids were all completely in love with him, as were we.

I was also fairly sure that he would be my last, even though I did say that about Darby for the first year or so!! I soaked up every breath of him as a baby and I honestly remember so much, even though the baby brain fog was very strong.

This has clearly just become a blog post to unapologetically publish cute baby photos, but I did want to celebrate the milestone of getting more sleep more regularly.

I’m yet to fully feel the affects of more sleep; in all honesty for the first few weeks of good nights sleep, I actually felt worse, as though my body wasn’t quite used to getting seven full hours each night. Hilarious right?? As if at any moment I would be thrust back into interrupted nights. But, after great success with a bed-wetting alarm for Darby, we seem to be on easy street!

Sleep-wise that is.

Of course now other challenges are presenting themselves, but when I’ve had good sleep, everything seems just that slightly bit easier.