"She'll sleep well tonight", four simple little words, but they usually mean we won't and we're in for a night from HELL!! Let me explain a little more...

It's something we'll never say, never dream of saying, it's just tempting fate, isn't it? My daughter is coming up to her fifth birthday, she has started mainstream school and loving every minute of it, she comes home each night tired out after a busy day but even then it doesn't make any difference to the night ahead. She has a great bedtime routine and usually goes off to sleep fairly quickly, the funtimes normally start just as we're going to bed, on a "good" night we can be up 3 or 4 times, a "bad" night we're up all night!

I know what you're thinking, this just sounds like most children, I guess it does, but the main difference is that most children can tell you what the matter is when they wake up. She has a limited vocabulary and uses makaton sign language so sometimes finds it difficult explaining what the matter is. It breaks our hearts when she is sobbing her eyes out and can't tell us whether she has tummy ache or she's scared there's a monster in her cupboard. She'll normally calm down after a while and settle back to sleep, but ten minutes later she can be crying her eyes out again.

Well this week, we booked ourselves onto a "Sleep Therapy" course being run by FISH, where we hoped to pick up some useful hints and tips. What did we learn? Well, unfortunately not very much. The course was well run and there were lots of good ideas but the advice we were given was mostly stuff we had tried, unsuccessfully in the past. I think the most useful thing to come out of the day was the fact I realised we're not the only ones in this situation, others are "suffering" as well, there are others out there at two in the morning desperately trying to get their child back to sleep.  

But, however many times she wakes in the night, she's always up bright and early the next morning as if nothing had happened, rearing to go again!!!  So we'll carry on doing what we do, being there for her, comforting her, just as all parents do - roll on tonight!

Sleep well...