The nightly antics of sleep deprived parents

I make no bones about the fact that I am sleep deprived and actually I surprise myself sometimes at the fact that I am able to function like a normal human being, and by normal obviously I mean that I am recognisable as a human and can stay awake all day without falling asleep standing up. Which by any means is better than my husband can manage, if I leave him unattended for just 30 seconds, I will return and he will be sound asleep. This is no exaggeration, I can literally take a phone call and return to the room to find a sleeping husband on the sofa and a toddler standing on the tv unit. Yes, that actually happens, much more than you would think. 

Any parent can tell you the struggle they have with trying to get enough sleep, and everyone has a different story to tell. I don’t so much have any sleep issues with my eldest, at 9 years old he will only stay up too late if he is watching YouTube in bed, and in preparation for his teenage years, in the morning he will either sleep in until about 10am or will just get up quietly and play his Xbox. 

My toddler’s sleep on the other hand is a different story…
Now he generally settles ok in the evening, and will sleep for a few hours but after that? It can be hours before he goes back to sleep, he treats the first sleep of the night as a power nap and he is bright eyed and bushy tailed by 10pm. Now, you might ask, what on earth do we do in that time to prevent our impending insanity? Here are a few things I might suggest and that I have done over the past week:

• Sort out your emails – I have two email accounts, one that I opened in 2013 and is linked to my Facebook account, so I get hundreds of emails which are notifications, adverts, spam and a lot of crap in general, very few are from real actual people. The second email account is slightly newer but equally full of ‘amazing offers’ and other shit. And what with them being gmail accounts, there are 3 tabs, Inbox, Social and Promotions. I sat there for nearly two hours the other night between 1 and 3am, sifting through the endless emails, deleting the rubbish, sorting the few important bits into folders and generally tidying up my inbox. Then done it all over again on the second account. I won’t lie to you, it was mind numbingly boring but there are only so many times you can scroll down a social media news feed and pretend it is enjoyable. 

• Do some housework – Because there is no better time than after midnight to bleach the kitchen or clean the bathroom, and you can actually get a lot done in the small hours. You’re up anyway so may as well attempt to make some good use of the time. At this stage of sleep deprivation your survival on minimal sleep is that of a pro so it only makes sense to utilise the time!

• Go on imaginary spending sprees – this one cracks me up even writing it because it exposes just how bizarre me and my husband are and that when we are so tired and are awake all night we mainly sit up laughing at each other’s stupid impressions or terrible jokes. So last night is a prime example of this, I was looking at an 8 bedroom house in Buckinghamshire, which was 3.5 million and he was looking for a nice 4×4 to park on the drive. Ordinarily these would both be considered completely pointless, but when trying to pass the time, it is rather entertaining to pretend that we are in fact millionaires and sitting in our 3 bedroom townhouse wondering what to spend our riches on!