Sleeps, Nightmares, And Room Changes!

Baba hasn’t been great at sleeping for a long time now!

It started last year when Rhianna died, and we managed to get him nearly back to normal and then his Uncle Dave died and he was very scared at this point! He didn’t like Daddy going to work, he didn’t like being left and the nightmares started.

Ever since then he has been really bad at sleeping, he hasn’t wanted to be left and he has generally always ended up in our bed and going to sleep with one of us next to him. We tried to use school as I tool to get him back to sleep in his own room, but that didn’t work and just resulted in screaming, crying and Baba constantly coming out of his room, and some nights a nearly three-hour bed time.

It was hell!

Both Mr L, Baba and myself hated it.

I am not a person that can go to bed on a row, I would rather stay up all night and fight it out and sort it. And I hated that every night Baba was going to bed after his Daddy or I had shouted at him. It got to us all. We were all sleep deprived. And it affected everything, Baba was badly behaved in the day and we were all short-tempered. It made at least one day every week an actual nightmare!

Baba started school on the Thursday and Wednesday night was bad! Over the weekend he would only go to sleep with one of us with him and by Sunday we had the nightmare from hell!

We went nearly three hours of crying, screaming, leaving his room, shouting that he had bad dreams before he had even closed his eyes and complete upset and distress! He was in tears, I was in tears and Mr L was really at the end of his tether!

He finally went to sleep about ten pm and then was back in our bed at 3am and no one really slept from that moment on! He ended up starting his first full week of school with massive bags under his eyes and looking drained!

We knew that something had to be done, and it had to be done quickly!

So while he was at school on Monday, I went out and brought him a dream catcher, he had one a couple of years ago when he was having night terrors and it seemed to solve the problem then.

I also got mum over to line his curtains. His bed looked directly at his window and outside there is a street lamp, so we didn’t doubt that he may have been seeing shadows of things flying under the lamp. Not only did mum line his curtains she also folded them up, as they were right down to his floor, and they didn’t need to be that long. So he came home from school with curtains triple the thickness that they were before.

When Mr L came in, he let Baba pick where he wanted things to be in his bedroom, and then moved it all around for him.

Baba instantly decided that he wanted his bed along the wall of his window, and his Lego table moved to where his bed used to be!

So everything was moved, and the new curtains were put up along with his dream catcher next to his pictures of Uncle Dave and Rhianna!

And it was bedtime!

And he went straight to sleep, we didn’t shout about it too much as he was generally shattered!

We carried on with the new room for the rest of the week, nothing as else has changed with his bedtime routine, except the room. And every night we have had sleep.

He gets into bed, has his story, we put on his CD, leave the light on and he sits and ‘reads’ for a little while (he can’t read but he tries his hardest), the only thing that he insists on is that someone has to stay upstairs with him in another room. Which is fine, it means I can do a little work in the study and Mr L generally watches a little TV until Baba falls asleep. It is a massive improvement from what it was a week ago and last night he was fast asleep by 8.02pm, minutes after his Daddy left the room.

He seems settled in the new set up of his room, and he seems happy to stay in there. He is in there throughout the day playing with his Lego and it is lovely that he is getting to sleep and bedtime is a happy chilled time, rather than the stress that it was!

It is also lovely that the dreams seem to have gone, I am not sure whether it is the dream catcher or what but something has worked. As he told us the other day, “If the dream catcher doesn’t get the dreams then Uncle Dave will punch them out of the room, and Rhianna will bite them!”

To be honest as long as he sleeps and that is what he has to think to get sleep we are happy with that.

We just like having our happy child back with out the tears, the rows and the completely tired child that we were dealing with every day!