That rarest of things - an unbroken night's sleep!

On Sunday night Oliver slept through the night without making a sound. In fact I woke at 5.50am, realised I hadn't heard him and so felt the need to check him as it's so unusual for him to be that quiet. He was fine of course. The next day I felt pretty good after a relatively good night's sleep.

Sadly this is a rare occurence. He tends to always wake around 5am (or 4am this morning) and need his dummy to go back to sleep, then he'll wake about once an hour and need us to go in and find his dummy for him again. At the start of the night he tends to sleep well for a couple of hours then stir or even wake and cry. This means there's not much point going to bed until he's passed this point, which then leaves perhaps 4 or 5 hours of unbroken sleep until the 4-5am waking.

That's a typical night. On a bad night he will wake about every hour and need one of us to go in and settle him.

However, it's not all bad news. Since we have started to put a second nightlight on that let's him see around himself in his cot a little better, he has been better at getting himself back to sleep. So some nights he wakes a few times but goes back to sleep without our intervention.

The bottom line is that we are still not getting many nights of unbroken sleep. I think this is hitting Hayley harder than me as she gets up with him during the week and I get up at the weekends. Of course, once she goes back to work I am going to start to suffer more too! But when we do get a good night's sleep it's amazing how much it helps. If he could sleep through consistently I think we would truly start to feel human again.

Of course, we have a book on this subject ("Sleep: The secret of problem free nights" by Beatrice Hollyer), but we foolishly loaned it to someone when his sleeping seemed to be improving. We should have known better!