The night time diaries guest post from OddHogg

Next up in the night time diaries is Kim from OddHogg. Kim’s blog is lovely and one I love to read . Her little Piglet is so cute ( that’s her nickname for her son not an actual piglet ). She also has a fab post about type 1 diabetes which may be useful to you.

Hello! I’m Kim, the voice behind OddHogg. OddHogg is a family and lifestyle blog where I share about my family, the things we do and the adventures we have.

I have one little boy, Piglet, who is nearly 9 months old. I really struggled to get a proper night time routine established with him at first, but we recently had a bit of a bedtime boot camp to get us on the right track!

So many people start the bedtime routine with a bath, but it just doesn’t work for us. Piglet hated the bath for ages so if we gave him one before bed he just got worked up. He’s happy enough to have a bath now, but we still don’t do it daily.

Piglet’s bedtime routine is pretty straight forward at the moment. At around 7pm I take him upstairs. I keep the lights dim, change his nappy and put on his pj’s and Grobag. We then settle into the rocking chair for a feed. Once he’s done he’s usually pretty sleepy so I pop him into his cot and make sure his sleepytot bunny is within reach. I put on Ewan the Dream Sheep to play some annoying plinky-plonky music and voila, Piglet goes to sleep.

Or that’s the way it’s meant to happen anyway!

The bunny and sheep seem pretty crucial to bed time around here. Oddly he is happy to sleep without them when he has stayed over at my mums, but at home they’re a must. Ewan was a gift that I received at my baby shower and we got it out one night and never stopped using it. It’s working for us so I’m rolling with it for now!

Once he is in bed I generally don’t see or hear from him again until after 6am, but it hasn’t always been that easy. Piglet has never been one for spending excessive amounts of time awake in the middle of the night. As a general rule he would wake, have some milk then go straight back to sleep. Our issues lay in getting him into bed before us. He though 10pm was an acceptable bedtime until almost 8 months old.

Unfortunately for me, I was getting significantly less sleep than Piglet. For the first 8 weeks of his life I was having to express milk as he refused to breastfeed. That meant that he would have his milk and be off to dream land again, and I’d be there hooked up like a dairy cow expressing for his next feed. It was the most exhausting part of the new born days and I was so relieved when he swapped to breastfeeding. I instantly got about 3 hours extra sleep a night!

When he was born Piglet slept in a mosses basket next to my bed. I was way too scared to have him in the bed with us. The thought of falling asleep with him in the bed with us terrified me so I wouldn’t even have him in the bed with me to feed him, I always got up and went elsewhere.

These days it’s a different story. His bed raiding is rare, and tends to be when I am too snooze to get up. JHogg is usually already up and off to work (he leaves around 6:30am) so there is plenty space for Piglet to be in the bed too.

He has crept in a few times in the middle of the night – out of desperation from me. I don’t like doing it though as I can’t relax and don’t tend to get much sleep. As I’m so worried about him being there. He also seems to think that getting into the bed is like a buffet, and will help himself to breastmilk as and when he feels like it. Typical!

Luckily for us Piglet is a pretty heavy sleeper. It is just as well because we have a dog that likes to bark! If he woke every time something set Rodney off our evenings would be a shambles.

If I could go back and change anything I would definitely fight for the routine earlier. It was a tough few weeks getting bedtime sorted, but it’s such a breeze now I just wish I’d done it sooner!

I think the most important thing we should remember about babies and night time activities is. That for every 8 week old that sleeps though the night there is a 2 year old who still won’t sleep for more than 5 hours at a time. There’s no perfect way to get your little one to sleep – you’ve just got to roll with what they give you!

Thank god I’m not the only one with a dog that likes to bark !! the amount of times I have tried to sush her just incase she woke Ava up.

If you enjoyed reading this guest post from Kim over at OddHogg then check out her blog. Or pop over to her Facebook,Twitter,Instagram or Pinterest page for updates.