The night time diaries – Guest post from Poppy Reflects

Next up in the night time diaries is Poppy Reflects. This is a lovely little blog and one I hadn’t come across until doing the night time diaries. Poppy talks about all the exciting adventures her family get up to. Also shares how she is preparing for her new arrival .

Hello, I’m Poppy from over at Poppy Reflects. I am mummy to Taormina who is two and am currently due with a baby boy! My blog started when Taormina was a few months old .As a way of recording all of our memories as a family and as a way to connect with other parents. I write about a whole lot of everything including our adventures, my general musings on life and reviews on everything mummy, beauty etc.

Since Taormina was born we have had several different bedtime routines. Some more successful than others. I should probably start by saying that she didn’t sleep through the night until she was almost two. I think this was a combination of her being very strong willed and doing it when she was ready. Us having little willpower through lack of sleep to implement change. Also feeding problems early on resulting in us having to wake her so often she never really had a chance to sleep for any stretch.

At the start of breast feeding Taormina had poor weight gain and fed for about 20/24 hours a day for the first few weeks. I had ruptured stitches so lay on my side and fed her more or less all the time meaning she was never really put down. She also had a tongue tie cut twice and during this time we had to wake her to feed two hourly to ensure it didn’t heal back in place. It seems that this all got her into a pattern of not sleeping for a long stretch of time and for the first six months we literally did not have a bedtime routine at all, she just stayed up with us and slept what felt like very little.

I would spend about two hours at night dancing around our bedroom to Mumford and Sons while she screamed the house down before swapping shifts with Dan until eventually she would go to sleep for an hour. I should probably add daytimes weren’t much improvement, she was generally too overtired to nap I think and having always been a baby that craved touch she lived in ;