To my beautiful sons,

I’m sure you’re right in your current belief that mummy was getting a bit too much sleep lately. After all, being woken every three hours to feed a newborn is almost the same as the halcyon days of getting 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep pre-children (a time which I now believe is actually just fictional)

I’m sure you’re just thinking that waking so infrequently could have been said to have been getting a bit dull, so your exercise this past week of “let’s wake the big ones more often” has been especially welcome. It’s been interesting to see the world through the sleepy fug that waking every hour brings, so thanks for that!

I have to say that I really think it’s great how the two of you are developing a sense of team work so early in your sibling relationship. You have clearly devised a plan between you to make sure that you’re not both awake at the same time so you both get to benefit from some one-to-one parent time, and I’m sure the worlds greatest mathematicians would be interested in how you’ve worked out the optimal time between wakings:

For those that are interested this works out as:
Time of your brother returning to bed/sleep + 32 minutes (approximately the time it takes mummy to become completely settled, warm and cosy under the duvet and be drifting off to a lovely sleep)

3 year old, I think you’re doing especially well at this given that before the baby came along you were sleeping through routinely and not waking at all, so you must have had to work hard to get into the new routine of night waking and crying. And let me take this opportunity to say that I totally agree with your many and varied stated reasons for waking up. My favourites from the past few days include “I don’t need anything, I just wanted to see you”, and “I don’t want orange juice” (none was being offered, it was 2am)

And to you, littlest one, I must say I really appreciate how you’ve waited until you’re almost 12 weeks old to experiment with waking more often. After all, knowing that you CAN go 4 or even 5 hours between feeds at night makes it even more delightful when I get to see your beautiful face more often than that. I know this is just a recent experiment, but I think we’ll all be happier (or is that just me?!) when you go back to your lovely blissful previous routine.

So, my darling children, thank you for your consideration and thoughtfulness, but I think maybe we should try to see each other a bit less between the hours of 7pm to 7am. It’s not you, it’s me, and to be honest that way you’ll have a much nicer set of parents the rest of the time. Deal?

Trying to win me over with his “I love Mummy” t shirt whilst sleeping LIKE A LOG during the day!