Bed Time Battles

Over the past few months bedtime has simply become a battle ground here.  Molly has never been a great sleeper, as a baby she never slept very much at all. But as she reached 2 years old her sleeping patterns shifted and she was so much better.  Until recently.  Each night bedtime comes around and I dread it, I know what is going to happen and I am totally out of ideas of what I can try to do to stop it.

We have the same routine every night, I tend to put Alfie to bed first then Molly, Alfie goes down like a dream, straight of to sleep, he doesn’t sleep right through the night at the moment but getting him to bed is simple. I then tuck Molly in and leave her to head off to the land of nod, but within minutes she is up again claiming she needs anything from a wee to a drink or even a snack because she is hungry.  Putting her back to bed is exhausting when I know minutes later she is up again.  This happens every single night and she is getting worse. If bed time was not bad enough she is getting up throughout the night too.  I always put her back to bed trying not to engage in any conversation with her and ignoring her requests for the ridiculous things she claims she ‘needs’ before she can possibly go to sleep.

I don’t mean to sound selfish, but I need time to myself on an evening.  I am on my own with the children all day and most of the night, whilst my Husband works very long hours so it is hard to get anything done.  My evenings are my time to catch up on work, emails and my blog, all of which at the moment are being totally neglected.  By the time I actually get her settled some nights it can be 9pm or even later by which point I am too exhausted to even think let alone do anything productive.

Tonight I have hit breaking point.  She had a late night last night celebrating her Big Brothers birthday so was ready for bed by 6.45pm after being barely able to keep her eyes open eating her tea tonight. After the third ‘get up’ tonight I could take no more.  I put her back to bed and ended up really shouting at her, if I am honest it was more like a scream rather than a shout – it was horrible.  Not exactly the calm way I should have dealt with the situation.  I was then left in floods of tears feeling like the worst mother in the world with a screaming toddler, who after settling her back down to bed then got up TWICE MORE!

She is now finally asleep which tonight took over an hour, which is actually quite good compared with the last few nights.  I have still had no dinner, have a living room full of toys to put away and a stack of work to do.  I don’t know what else I can do, I have tried everything and I am just simply exhausted with bed time, and totally exhausted with being exhausted.