Sleep, who needs sleep!!

It can often take my son a long time on an evening to calm his mind enough to be able to settle and sleep. It is like his imagination is on overload. Some evenings and he will tell me stories about yetis, wolves, dragons and visiting the Himalayas. There will be at least 2 trips to the toilet, then his Ted will mysteriously get lost and the lights have to be turned on to find him. Sometimes when finding Ted, he will hang off the bed upside-down, ‘like a bat’ he says, but eventually sleep will come.

It’s his visits in the middle of the night that I have a love-hate relationship with. I feel that I’ve been living in the newborn stage of having a child for the last (almost) 7 years. And let me tell you, its rough going! Working full-time, looking after a family, and trying to look after myself is a hard juggling act which often (more often than I would like to admit) requires running off caffeine and high carb foods for energy. Sometimes he will sleep the whole night, sometime he will come and join us in our bed and fall straight back to sleep, and other nights he will come and continue telling me his stories and my husband will retreat to my son’s room (I have tried retreating, but he will just come and find me and then we play musical beds for an hour or more!)

But in the middle of the night when I’m half asleep and he is telling me his stories, he asks for hugs and wants to be close to me, and at that moment, I’m the most important person to him. I know, just like with a newborn baby, that this our life will not always look like this. So I treasure his little hand pulling me in for a tighter hug, and I’m grateful that I can offer him the comfort he needs.