If you’ve met up with me at any point in the past six months, a conversation that 100% would have come up is about Marlo and his sleep. For the whole of Marlo’s first year, we accepted and tolerated his restlessness at night. It’s normal for babies. But after that point, me and my husband have grown a bit tired of his attention-seeking tactics in the early hours. He’s 19 months old now and we need to have a break now.
When I say that it’s bad, I’ll give you examples from the past three nights:
Night 1: Bed at 6.45pm, awake at 11.15pm, awake at 2.35am, awake at 4.50am, up for the day at 6.30am
Night 2: Bed at 6.45pm, awake at 3.15am, awake at 4am, up for the day at 5:50am
Night 3: Bed at 6.45pm, awake at 12:05am, awake at 2:20am, up for the day at 6.20am
He just doesn’t believe in unbroken sleep.
By this stage, we’ve actually tried all of the tactics. We’ve tried staying in the room with him until he’s settled. We’ve tried ignoring him, but then he screams until he wakes Cameo up. We’ve tried a night light. We’ve tried putting a teddy in there. We’ve tried more blankets. We’ve done it all.
He’s not allowed to sleep in our bed.
It’s actually a little bit funny because he goes straight down and back to sleep the minute he sees Chiino come in the room; he just needs to see him though. I don’t know if he’s just checking that we’re still there or what, but he doesn’t give us a break.
We were given the opportunity to try out some kids’ blackout blinds, which we figured may be exactly the thing we need to get him to sleep for longer. Before then he just had curtains in his room and perhaps it just wasn’t dark enough in there for him.
We went for some of the Order Blinds roller blackout blinds – with a starry sky design. They give you so many options in terms of size, chain, the control side and even the bottom finish. When they say that the blinds are made-to-order, they really mean it.
We got two, one for both Marlo and Cameo and they look great in their rooms. They fit in perfectly, they look great and they properly black out the room, even when Marlo goes down for his early afternoon nap. Plus, it now gives us a theme to work around and get rid of the awful curtains we’ve bee hiding in their rooms!
It was super simple to install the blinds and get them in place. In fact, it was probably harder trying to decide exactly what length blinds to order than it was to put them in place!
The blinds haven’t made much of a difference to Marlo’s sleep, but we know that these are really going to come in handy now that the mornings are getting a lot brighter. Once the clocks go forward at the end of March, it’s going to be absolutely essential that we have these to completely block out the light from the room, because we don’t want them up any earlier than they need to be.
Find the blinds that we chose here and feel free to explore all of their other options on the Order Blinds site.
