Right, so I thought I’d get back into blogging with a post about my favourite subject: sleeping.

Every parent I spoke to in the weeks leading up to Little P’s birth said, in essence, the same thing: “Kiss goodbye to sleep”. And, in a way, we have done.

The first few nights with Little P at home were deceptive, he was feeling the effects of Mrs C’s drugs binge and had chosen to sleep off his hang over. This gave us a false sense that Little P would sleep from 11pm until 6am from day one and that our lives would be full of joy, laughter and most importantly sleep. Oh but how wrong we were.

Peter decided that once his head had cleared he liked food. Yes, he liked food oh so very much. And he didn’t care whether it was day or night he want food.

So our nights were broken with feeds at 11pm then at 2am and again at 5am. But it seemed to be a routine and we didn’t mind so much. We had a system, on work nights (Mon to Thur) Mrs C would do the change and the feed and on all other nights (Fri to Sun) I would do the change and she would feed. And it worked. I found that I got used to being woken up in the middle of the night quite quickly. I’m not saying that I would have done it from choice but it wasn’t as bad as I feared.

So day after day, week after week we followed our routine. Not feeling too tired (no match sticks keeping our eyelids open at least) and just getting on with feeding and changing.

Until Little P had a growth spurt between 3 and 4 weeks. He suddenly became not quite so Little P. He tipped the scales over 10lb for the first time and his stomach was now big enough to hold more milk. So the 2am feed disappeared.

We still woke up obviously. We were in a routine. But Moderately Sized P (that name will never catch on) slept through until 5am.

This went down as the “Best day ever” since getting Little P.

Then he did it 2 days in a row, then 3 days then 4 days. Our sleepless nights seem to be over.

Except now we’re really tired all the time. Little P lets us sleep until 7am at the moment but we’re really knackered. We’d be feeling really lucky about having a sleeping baby, if only we had the energy.

I think this is down to those early weeks of not really feeling tired finally catching up with us. Plus we’re trying to fit bits of our old lives back into our schedules (exercising, socialising, blogging, that sort of thing) but it’s a bit of a squeeze.

Anyway, we are really lucky to have a sleeping baby and every time he closes his eye’s at 9pm and keeps them shut until 7am I say a little “thank you” under my breath.

But what I think has been the biggest eye-opener for me (ouch, terrible pun) is just how little sleep I really need each night. In fact I couldn’t agree more with one of the other Dad’s from our NCT group said to me the other day “What annoys me most is if I’d known I could get by with so little sleep before I would have done so much more with my life. But I was in bed.”

So I have kissed goodbye to sleep, but for all the right reasons.