My family's sleep circus: how we have navigated the messiness of sleep in our home over the past six years
Two kids, six years, and a whole lot of musical beds; our family's sleep sitch has looked less than perfect over the years. But, we love it! Here's to normalising messiness of childhood sleep. I chat today about: - surrendering to safe bedsharing with my babies - transitioning toddler to own room - being flexible with naps and bedtimes - our ever-changing sleep arrangements over the years - how temperament affects sleep - sleep apnea - nighttime breastfeeding and weaning experiences - how you can choose how sleep looks for your family Insta is where I hang out: @mamamatters.au If you are looking to uplevel and optimise your family's sleep with a group of likeminded mamas; check out my upcoming Honest Sleep Groups for mamas of babies 0-8 months: https://www.mamamatters.com.au/honest-sleep-groups
Hey Mama, I have a Sleep Guide for you! For birth to 18 months, this guide is steeped in evidence and laced with compassion. And you can download the first chapter absolutely free HERE.
Are we Insta pals? If not, why not? Come and hang out at @mamamatters.au!
As always, thanks for being here- if you enjoy this poddy I would LOVE if you could give a rating and a review. It means the world to me.
xx
TRANSCRIPT
Fiona Weaver 00:09
Hello love and welcome to the Manage chatters podcast. If you're keen to ditch all of the parenting shoulds and want to uncomplicate sleep and parenting, you are in the right place, through honest conversations with experts and each other, we will help you to cut through all of the noise and to love the heck out of your imperfect and authentic parenting. I'm Fiona, a social worker by trade. Now supporting families with sleep and parenting through my business, Mama matters. I'm passionate about parenting psychology, biologically normal infants sleep and infant mental health and attachment. I'm also a parent, and I am on a mission to normalize the shitshow that can be parenthood.
Fiona Weaver 00:48
I know that right now you might be trapped under a sleeping baby. Or maybe you've got your headphones in to soften the blue of the afternoon witching hour, wherever and whoever you are, I want you to know that you belong here. Now, let's have a chat.
Fiona Weaver 01:06
Hello, my love, I hope you are well. I am coming at you with a bit of a personal app. Today, I am talking all about my own sleep journey with my two kids. I have two children, Knox who is six and a half Anzali who is three and a half. And my experience having two of them has meant that I get to see just how different they are. that not everything is our fault. And it's really reassuring and validating to see two kids with the same parents. Of course, they don't get the exact same parenting or the exact same circumstances growing up.
Fiona Weaver 01:46
But generally speaking, sleep approached the same way with both of them. And both very, very different sleepers. So we had Knox back in 2016. And I remember buying a co sleeper bassinet to go next to the bed. And I really thought that that would be such a beautiful thing because it would be close enough to smell me close enough for me to just put a little resting reassuring hand on his chest when he stirs between feeds and just go back to sleep. And it'll be so beautiful, but also safe because you should never bring your baby into bed with you. Well, it took maybe a day maybe night to to realize that this baby wasn't going in the damn bassinet. And we succumb to that really quickly because it just felt right. And we had a home visiting midwife who taught us how to bed share safely. And we bed shared then for
Fiona Weaver 02:40
probably a couple of years we had we had a cot for him, he would do some naps in the car. And he would only ever sleep for you know half an hour at a time until he was closer to eight months he would then once he went down to two naps, he would probably do more an hour and a half, once or twice a day. But he was very early on, he required a lot of support to go to sleep, he would typically feed to sleep or be bounced or rocked to sleep, he would like to be close. So he would often wake up for a reset or
Fiona Weaver 03:12
he was just on he was just intense. He was active. He was sensitive, reactive. And that kind of showed up in his sleep. So at the time, I thought
Fiona Weaver 03:26
I didn't necessarily blame us or blame myself. But I did feel like he was the way he was because we hadn't put all of these good sleep habits in and looking back at his sleep as a baby now that I know him as a six year old. It makes total sense. This is just who he is. And this is how it presented when he was a baby. So it's really, really interesting. It's really nice to have that hindsight, I guess when you are in different stage of life. So anyway, we've been shared on and off for a few years. We got him into his own room. I think at the start it was a floor bed and you just start the night in there and then it come into bed with us. And then he had his
Fiona Weaver 04:10
his kid bed at some stage and he liked there. And first of all, we had to live with him while he would
Fiona Weaver 04:17
intensely caress my face as he fell asleep and gradually, gradually, gradually he needed less of that physical contact and it would be enough for us to just be there. Then I had Zoey in my tummy when he was almost three was about when we were due to have zali and a couple of weeks before we were due to have her he stopped wanting to sleep in his room and we welcomed him in into our bed because we could see that he was going through something he was feeling a little bit more insecure, a little bit anxious. And so we welcomed him into the family bed. And then when we had zali the family bed was very soft so we couldn't bed share on that bed. And I went into his room
Fiona Weaver 05:00
On his kin mattress and stayed in there for a couple of months while I had the newborn to sleep with me, where it was safe and where we could feed in the middle of the night and not disturb the boys. And Ross and Knox slept in the family bed together. Then as Zaarly got a little bit older, and we were ready to all come back together, we took that mattress from Knox's bed and put it alongside our family beds. So we had the family bed, where Ross and sometimes me and Knox would be in there and then Sally had her space on the floor, we didn't have a dog at that point, we wouldn't be able to have the dog anywhere near there if zali was on the bed.
Fiona Weaver 05:40
But I would just sort of feed her to sleep in her space. And then I would be up and down from the family bed. And that worked really well for a really long time. Zaarly seemed more okay to have her own space in bed. So I would often spend most of the night in the family bed and just hop down and give her a feed a couple of times a night, which was very different to Knox who needed to be physically attached at all times for a long time. So once we were all settled in there, we talked to noxee about whether he wanted to go back into his room. Well, we actually set it up so that you know we can get your room ready again and you can go back in there. And he said, but all of my family's in this room. And we just kind of looked at each other and we thought you have made they are okay, I guess we are all in this room. And so when we felt like we needed some space in the family bed, we brought Knox's bed into our room. So hilariously, at some stage during some season of our parenting. We had the king size mattress on the floor for the family bed, we had zali single bed on the floor alongside the family bed. Then we had Knox's mattress on the floor at the end of the bed. And we all had our own sleep spaces. But we're sharing this room, I turned their bedroom into my home office, it was fantastic. Just living it up in our little two bedroom duplex. So that was how we sort of compromised in those early years of having babies who needed to be close to us or a baby and a toddler who needed to be close to us, whilst all my also maintaining a little bit of space for ourselves. That was by doing that. So having our own sleep spaces inside the bedroom all sleeping together. That felt right for a while. We knew that Knox would be more likely to go into his bedroom when zali could as well. But by that 10 months, we noticed that Zaarly for one she was always sick. She always had this wet cough. We had tested her for cystic fibrosis and had rounds of antibiotics and just couldn't work out what was going on for her. When she was crying at me one day, I noticed how big her tonsils were. So I took her to the doctor and said Is this a thing? And they referred us to an auntie. And sure enough, she had massive tonsils, enlarged adenoids, and she also needed grommets. She had heaps of fluid in her ears. So she had by that time also develop pretty gnarly sleep apnea. So she would snort and have breaks in her breath during sleep. It was she was a horrible, horrible baby to watch sleep it was you couldn't relax. Sometimes you'd just be lying there and you'd hear a stop and you'd be like, come on, come on, come on. And then she go.
Fiona Weaver 08:21
It was Yeah, awful. Her. Her breathing was so noisy as well, which we just thought was just her like you could hear her in another room. And then once we realized that that wasn't right. It was sort of like how do we miss all of that. Anyway, once we took her to the end, they wanted to book her in for the tonsils, adenoids and grommets. He was going to do it next week. But she was only 12 months at that point. What once we got seen and I just I just wasn't ready yet. So we decided to go. That was private, private assessment. And then we decided to wait for public because it's really expensive as well. And we just weren't ready yet. Anyway, so we decided to go public from there. He advocated for Category One review. And then a couple of months later, we got in there a couple of months after that. We were in for surgery. So we had the surgery, which is perhaps a podcast for another day, but I'm very happy that we don't need to go through that again. But it fixed her she came out of surgery and the very first sleep that she had, she was breathing beautifully through her nose. I couldn't hear anything. I thought I would grieve that really noisy breathing but it was very exciting to see her looking so peaceful in her sleep. What is interesting is that Knox versus Ali Knox had no underlying medical things happening. He sleeps quite soundly in that he breathes through his nose. He doesn't have any night terrors or sweats or anything like that. He's a good sleeper in that way but he is quite wasteful and requires a lot of reassurance around sleep time. So even
Fiona Weaver 10:00
bizarrely had sleep apnea, she still was not that bad sleeper. And I guess that's a difference between signalers and soothers. Right, which is another podcast episode. But soothers may just wait between sleep cycles and just go back to sleep without crying whereas soothers I'm sorry. signalers will usually call out and require parental intervention to go back to sleep. So zali even though she had sleep apnea, her quality of sleep would have been awful, but she still wasn't overly wakeful, requiring intervention. So Sally, I would say is a more easygoing sleeper, she's a bit more adaptable and flexible. So once she was ready, once she was recovered from surgery, so a month or two, after her surgery, we started to move them into their room. We got two little stackable IKEA beds, I think they're called UHD Takkar or something like that. I probably just butchered that. But they stack on top of each other. And they adjust also really low to the ground. They're kind of like toddler bed height. Actually, I'm remembering. I'm remembering they're being bits in between, I think we actually got a queen bed first, and we thought that they might sleep together. And then that didn't work out for some reason. And then we got bunk beds, maybe. I know we had bunk beds at one point because Knox wanted a bunk bed. That didn't work out either. I don't know why we thought Knox would sleep in a bunk bed. I think it was one night one. And then the novelty wore off. It was too far away and by himself. And then I honestly can't remember the cycle of events. But eventually we got these IKEA stackable beds. And we put those in there and they had their bed each next to each other. And they did great. Knox just needed someone in there with him. Didn't have to be a grown up. He was very happy with it being Zaarly. I think at that point, Sally was close to two and she would typically sleep in her bed there all night. If not, she just total into our bedroom and into our bed at some stage. And you know what, basically that has gone on until now. Now my husband and I take interns of who puts them to bed at night. putting them to bed means maybe reading a story sitting down doing Wordle knocks loves to do Wordle and then just being there while they fall asleep and that seems to work. And most nights Sally will stay asleep in her bed. And most nights Knox will still toddle in to our bed and will wake up and realize that he's in the middle of us. And we're okay with that. We are very happy to welcome our kids in we always have our door open, they are so welcome to come in at any time. As long as they start the night in their bed, then we are happy with whatever happens, you know, early hours of the morning, we are still really flexible with sleep, the kids have a bedtime of around 738 o'clock, that seems to work for them. Particularly because Sally is still napping. That's another thing Sally is quite high sleep needs. So she is three and a half and she will still nap at kindy for 45 minutes or so I get them to wake her and she'll still go to bed at a normal time. And if she is with us for a few days, you know over the weekend or something and the sleep drive will build up a little bit. She'll often crash out at say five or six o'clock on the couch and we'll put her into bed and she'll sleep till the morning. She's always been a very great transfer. So she can fall asleep in the car or fall asleep on the floor or on the couch wherever and she is very easy to just put in her bed, whereas Knox was much more responsive to being moved. If he would wake he would be awake. Just really, really different sleepers. I think Knox dropped his nap, probably closer to two completely dropped it. He was fine without it. He never really had those old early nights like Sally still does now. And he could still I would say that his average sleep time might be sort of 830 till six that would work for him. But we're often getting him into bed earlier. And therefore he wakes a little bit earlier. He also still pings his eyes open awake and rolls out of bed and hops up all at once. It all happens within about five seconds and I'm a bit the same. Rizzoli and Ross will wake up and lie in bed and look out the window and just take their time in getting up. So again, really, really different sleep styles. The other thing probably worth mentioning as well is that I breastfed Knox in the night until about two I think was when we did night went completely. Whereas zali fed until about one but she would often not even wake up to feed every night. And then we had something happen. I still to this day don't really know what happened with Zoe's breastfeeding, but it started to get really, really painful and then it became a source of 10 chin got really yucky really suddenly. And I think because of my experience with Knox, who could have been on the boob for way longer, but I was done and it took a little while to wean him from everything that I thought it would be the same for zali. And then she just stopped having it. And so by about 14 months, we were done, I think, and it was a little bit sudden, for me as well, I don't think I was quite ready to give it up. But it just kind of happened organically that way after, I put in some boundaries around feeding to sleep, because that was uncomfortable for me. So once I started settling her in other ways, she was okay with that. And she stopped asking for it. So that happened really easily. But it was probably a bit too sudden for me. And also knowing that she was about to undergo surgery. And I wouldn't have breastfeeding as a tool I had some regret about not trying that little bit harder to work things out. Because I still don't know what happened like why it suddenly got painful. I must have had I remember being on the phone to the ABA and asking my child health nurse and things but just never really got to the bottom of it and that it was done. I can't remember if I've talked about naps yet. But naps have also been very flexible. They have either been on the run in the car in the pram, Knox never slipped in the pram until he got a little bit older. But Zaarly would sleep in the pram, Knox would always be pretty good in the carrier, I have never let a nap get in the way of a good time. So I will never say I can't come to something I really want to go to. If it's nap time, I can always work around to that either offer them a kit when they're out or push it back and catch up later. And that's a message I want to get across as well is that sleep can be so fluid and flexible that it averages out over every few days. So if you haven't a day where you can't put away time for a good nap, you can always catch up, you can always catch up with an earlier bedtime and a better nap the next day. It doesn't need to be the same every day. But that's our family sleep story. And I love to share these stories because I love to normalize the messiness of sleep. I think sometimes we imagined that our babies will be going off to sleep calmly and peacefully in their in their cot and sleeping all the way through by about six months. I don't know what your expectations were. But mine was certainly like that. And in reality, once we surrendered to the messiness, it was really messy. And that was okay, it worked for us. And that is sort of part of our family values, to be flexible around sleep and to be to have sleep as a really nice place to go. And for that to mean togetherness. And that's the end of the day, when we are all together, we're always there when they fall asleep, until they don't want us there. And Sally doesn't need us there. Sometimes if she's really tired, she'll ask us to put her in her bed, put the cover all the way up to the shoulders and then go, and we're happy to follow their lead on that sleep doesn't feel stressful for us anymore.
Fiona Weaver 17:59
It definitely has we're not, you know, completely immune to the stress of sleep or frequent wakefulness or anything. And there were definitely so many times where I would look around and think that we were the only ones doing it like this, every other kid sleeps, all the other kids are just gradually getting better at sleeping through the night. And it just felt so far for us. But once we went into this is who our kid is, this is what we're happy to work with, we are all feeling rested enough. This is just where we're at, then, yes, we were tired, but it's very different, being tired, versus tired and anxious and fearing a failure, because that adds a whole lot of layers. So I hope this has been really helpful for you to be able to hear a real life story of how sleep really can work in a family when we see all of this marketing, all of these messages that are sent to us that babies should sleep independently alone in their cart for a long period of time, it can make us feel a little bit alone and like we're doing something wrong if it's looks a little bit messier at our house. So again, I really really feel passionate about normalizing the messiness of childhood sleep. And of course, if you are the type of person who feels a sense of anxiety when you listen to this sleep circus and you're like I would not be able to handle that I need my own space. That's okay, you can work with that too. As a parent, you get to choose how you want to approach sleep, you get to choose what your family values are and how you structure sleep. So as long as you are working within the context of your child's development and their attachment needs and you're being safe and respectful and a little bit flexible, then you get to choose how sleep looks in your family to a certain point and families are full of kids and grownups with different temperaments and preferences and it's about finding what works for you and your unique family. So if you are not entirely happy with your sleep situation at the moment or you want to level up your sleep game, please join our on asleep groups which are coming Up in the next couple of weeks. This one is for mums of little babies up to eight months. So if you want to learn more about sleep and optimize sleep for your family, your unique family in the way that you choose, please join us I would love to have you. Thank you so much. Make sure you share this with your friends if you feel called to. And thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for listening to mama chatters if you enjoyed this episode, let's continue the conversation on Instagram at MAMA matters.au. Be sure to share this app with your family and friends. And don't forget if you liked it, please leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you again and I will see you next time.
