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Before I had my twins, I rarely thought about sleep. I just did it, went to bed and went to sleep. I can vividly remember, in the early days with J, waking him to talk in the middle of the night, going for walks at approaching midnight, watching films until the early hours and still managing to wake up and go to work with minimal effort. I probably have distinctly rose coloured goggles on about this, I probably moaned, I definitely bought too many Starbucks but I will allow myself the memory of sleep being an easy thing.

Oh, and the naps. We used to nap. It was fairly rare that I went through an entire day off without a little sleep in the afternoon, waking just before J was due to come home and reapplying the mascara that had smudged all over my face.

Then the girls were born, and oh boy, did things change. Twins are exhausting, sleep depriving demons. There were nights when I watched it become morning without having slept at all, the two of them tag teaming to make sure that as soon as I put one down, fed and changed, the other would fuss. Grace was a low birth weight baby, so she could only be fed every two hours at first as she was so small and this made things harder and harder. Eventually, we worked out a routine, a routine that we intend to do again with this new baby and things improved but there was a time there when sleep seemed entirely absent.

You expect things to improve now that they are nearly four and you would be half right. Isla has always been an amazing sleeper and remains so, asleep at seven every evening and consistently waking at seven the next morning. If she does wake up, she is soothed back to sleep almost immediately and I pray and hope that this baby takes after her biggest sister.

Grace is less good. At the moment, she wakes for an hour to an hour and a half every single night, and then if that isn’t the case, she is up for the day any time from about half five. She is slowly killing me. She is then miserable from about six in the evening, but I’m so scared to let her sleep during the day. I dread going to sleep myself, and that’s hard now with my very own in-utero karate kid and I spend more time thinking about sleep than anything else in my life.

It will get better, or it won’t. Or it will and then the baby will be born and I’ll be trying to keep a baby quiet in a too small flat so that she doesn’t wake everyone up. But that will ebb and flow into a routine of it’s own and I will allow myself, once she’s here, to give myself a break, to maybe sleep when she sleeps, to maybe thinking that playing candy crush for half an hour with a cup of tea is a perfectly acceptable way to spend my time.

It’s what I didn’t expect from parenthood. That and being obsessed with common (and not so common) childhood illnesses. It’s funny, isn’t it, how things evolve, how what you expected from your reading of baby blogs and the odd book didn’t come to pass at all, but the things that people never mentioned did.

I will add that Grace is an example to us all in many ways. She starts every day, EVERY DAY, with a smile on her face, telling me she’s had a beautiful sleep, asking me if I have had a beautiful sleep. I lie. She likes to chat and cuddle and I must do better than being grumpy because I’m exhausted.

*in case sleep stories are your absolute thing, my insta stories are often about sleep, so please follow me there for more fun!*