Sleep well and do good with Bed King

Bed King’s Children’s Hospital Trust campaign to raise money for the Red Cross War Memorial Hospital

Sleep never felt so good!

Bed King 

We were invited to test out Bed King's Comfort Solutions Lab. Bed King is running a fundraising initiative for the third year. R500 from every Comfort Solutions mattress is donated to the Children's Hospital Trust. All money goes towards upgrading the Red Cross War Memorial Hospital emergency unit. Last year they raised R250K, and they are planning to pass this target this year. 

Bed King Comfort Solutions Lab

Oh So Heavenly Pillow Mist and Body Spritzer - WIN

Oh So Heavenly fragrances to win on blog

I really love the Oh So Heavenly products. Two of them are part of the MomAgain40 Shweshwe goody bag give-away. They are affordable, great scented products which also carries the bunny logo. A few years back I got a goody package at a blogger meetup, and they have been on my monthly Clicks list for years now. They are definitely holiday survival products, but also as general go-to products every month. I also love to add them as extra birthday presents.

The two products included in the goody bag are the Oh So Heavenly Soothing Pillow Mist and the Bye-Bye Stress Body Spritzer.

Miss Fine's sleep milestone

Miss Fine SnapChat filter

This blog's main purpose has been to record the life and times we have with Miss Fine. I still value coming here and reading all about her milestones, and hope one day she will still be able to come back here as well. We forget so easily. (The Internet is also like a flashing file, and hopefully we will still be able to read it here in future?)

Sleep has not been the most easy since Miss was born. We could never find the off-button, until it finally was off! She can sleep very late every day. But going to sleep, that is the problem...

The Eldest has moved all of her belongings out of her room, and we have been slowly moving Miss Fine into her room. It is a bit bigger, and across from our room. Miss Fine has been enjoying setting up her new room. She has the big Miffy (which I had won at the Kids Living launch), which got set up immediately by Miss Fine. She can switch and dim the light because it is right next to her bed.

Miffy lighting

Guess what? This week she has gone to bed with a book, and all by herself. It is her decision. We used to take turns to lie next to her until she falls asleep. I know, she's nearly 10. (It took that long.) We are celebrating our "free time" from 8 - 9 pm at night. But it is also sad. The nightly cuddles and talks have come to an end. A milestone has been reached, and an era is gone.

We, the parents, don't know what we want.
"sigh"
"Yeah!"

Happy sleeping, Miss Fine! I know I am going to miss this.       

Crazy parenting advice

What is some of the craziest parenting advice you ever received?

(Question from “For my children, a mother’s journal of memories, wishes and wisdom” – compiled by Dionna Ford of  Code Name Mama)

The first four points are mine:

1. To stop breastfeeding before baby is able to talk. (Still breastfeeding at four years.)

2. To not spoil my baby by picking her up when she cries.

3. To start solids with rice cereal. (Which I did, regrettably!)

4. To not read any parenting magazines or information. So as not to be overwhelmed by all the information out there, and/or to get an inferior attitude with regards own parenting.

5. To not let your children sleep in your bed. (Added by Hubby!)


Did you receive any crazy advice?


Related post:

For my children - a keepsake

Sleep sorted! Really?

 

Three years and 7 months. You would think that sleep is not that much of an issue anymore. That sleep should be sorted by now...

Surprise, surprise!


Sleep is a total different ball-game for a three year old...

Maybe she has got our late night owl genes, or she's just a normal three year old?

The most recent phase is one where she goes to sleep in our arms. Demanding literally to sleep in the nooks of our arms... And also when waking up. Which can be a couple of times a night!

Getting her to bed at an acceptable time and getting her up a the break of a day. Not so easy...

Which means that she spends most of her sleeping time in our bed. Also no surprise, and I am not complaining!

There is nothing as sweet as waking up into that sweet face in the mornings...

 

We had a break from reality for a week. With sleep routines going for a dive!

But she went down even before her normal bed-time tonight! (Definitely something to do with that skipped afternoon nap...)

Fingers crossed for a good night's sleep before we check back into the rat race!

Happy sleeping!

Posted with Blogsy

My top 10 things to do during the holidays

It's the holidays! Finally!

Why did it feel like forever to get here?
Wednesday is my last day the office!

Tanya Kovarsky is hosting a camera give-away over at Dear Max, and we have to make a list of the top 10 things to do during the festive season. (*Thumbs* - I am feeling lucky!)

This is my list of the top 10 hings to do during the holiday season:
(Not in the order of importance)

- Sleep 

- Read through my stacks of books, and my new Kindle…

- Rest Doing nothing!

- Spending quality time with my daughter going off to university

- Spending quality time with my toddler

- Dates with Hubby

- Camping

- Hiking

- Coffee catch-ups with friends

- De-cluttering (a little bit of work for me as well!)



What do you have on your list  for the holidays?

Enjoy!

Morning's first photos at day care #27 - week in pictures

Monday - not a good start for the week - Sleep fail

Tuesday - had to drop her off sleeping!

Wednesday - it was a good night!

Thursday - it was a good night! She bumped her head!
(The Winnie the Pooh plaster is her own doing. There is no blood involved!)

Friday! She only woke up now, but the sweets money in her hand helped a lot!

Happy Friday!

Sleep fail

#sleepfail What a boring topic. The toddler and not sleeping.You would have thought that by two and a half years we would have cracked the code for getting a child to sleep?


Not so!

We had two sleep drives this week already, and last night Hubby proclaimed he was not going to drive around again!

What happened? (Murphy had fun, for sure!)

After the usual bed-time routine stuff of bath, Dad reading, and me getting into bed with her, Little Missy was bright-eyed and ready-for-action!

We even tried all the lights-off-and both sleeping with her in our bed…
We dozed off, off course.

In the end I just gave up and took a bath with her supervising on the side!

At half past ten we got into bed with her and told her that she could stay awake, but we are sleeping now.
The reverse psychology (or maybe finally tiredness?) finally kicked in, and she was gone.

But it was too late for a toddler of her age, and this morning she did not want to wake up…
I left her sleeping on a mattress at day care!

Total sleep fail! (Hung head in shame)



Photo: Earlier this week at day care: The Toddler loves her Dora the Explorer shoes.

Up and down in the elevator

The fragment from a dream… that keeps on lingering afterwards!


I am in a hotel. It seems I am on holiday. The people that populate my dream I do not know. (In the dream I do.) I step into the elevator, and somebody else is there as well. We press the buttons, but it is only button 10 that is working, as well as the button to the basement. The lift does not stop on floor 10 or the basement. It just goes straight past… I am going up and down in the elevator!

I woke up with the fragment of a memory of the dream yesterday. I have been in the dream before…

That feeling has been lingering for two days now…

Not able to get out, and being stuck!

Does it mean something? Or is it because I spent the night with the Toddler in her bed, trying to keep the blankets covering us both while she is sheet cycling? Not sleeping very well…


Do you take dreams seriously?

Do you remember your dreams?

Dear Toddler: SLEEP!

Hair bow and coffee

We do not hold this against you:

When you sometimes makes us do the musical chairs on our bed and yours, we do not hold it against you!
When we keep to a strict bedtime routine, but you still do not want to settle...
When we have to drive around at night to get you to sleep...
Even though you are happy to go to sleep with Mom, and later changes your mind, and want Dad to come and sleep with you...
When you do not want to go to sleep...
When we have to switch off all the lights, and you are forced to come to bed...
When you sleep in the middle between us, and we hold onto the edge of the bed, fighting for a bit of blanket...
When you have a bad dream, and do not stop crying in the night...
When you still want to sleep in in the mornings and we have to dress you upside down...
When Dad thinks we are never going to sleep again, although we only had a little bit of upheaval before twelve at night...

When we see that cute little face early in the mornings, we do not hold the sleep issues against you!
All is instantly forgiven!

Luckily we are a team working around the clock. When I give up in despair, your dad steps in! And when he gives up, I am ready to take on the next round!

(This too will pass! This too will pass!)

Related posts:
Mornings first photo at day care #20 - Monday morning sleepy
The toddler is down at 8

Dragonflies & Astronauts: Beautiful!

The picture of a sleeping toddler was not to be on Saturday night when we went to see a show of The Parlotones…


We usually don’t have a problem and at eight (nine perhaps on a weekend) she goes down, but Saturday she was bright and breezy!
Murphy does not sleep!

But we left the Toddler with the Teen. We haven’t done that much up until now!
You would think that we have a babysitting minder in-house… But, we mostly prefer to take the Toddler with. If that’s not an option, we leave her with her grandparents!

We worry about that “what if?” something very bad happens! (Just in case…)

Anyhow, we left the Teen and Toddler with a Barbie movie! And it went well! Except for lots of bed jumping that had to be endured, apparently…
(The Teen doesn’t mind at all, because she is getting a bit of pocket money!)

We went to see the live 3D movie of The Parlotones show of Dragonflies & Astronauts! It was incredible! Some of their best music in a great post-apocalyptic (?) show! Loved it! They had some problems sorting out the technicalities in the first songs, but from there we were with them on the stage!

We were sitting with our 3D goggles, and I wanted so much to take a picture. Imagine me with the blackberry with the 3D goggles in front of it! I only got this very poor image…

I hope there is a DVD coming out? I hope they do it again?
I want some more!
In the meantime I am listening to all their songs…

Yes, it was nice! (I am officially a Parlotones groupie now!)

Wordless Wednesday #84 - Sleeping sisters

Cuppa Java Friday

Skinny Cappuccino at Woollies

It is winter here (duh!), and all we are talking about is the cold! I have said before that we South Africans are real moaners-deluxe when our weather goes to the freezers. And guess what? Our midday temperature goes up to 19 degrees!


Not something to complain at all, you would say? Proving my point!

I am looking forward to the weekend. It started well already yesterday with a free meal at Woollies Campus Square! They forgot about our lunch-time order last week, and invited us back again this week! They score tops for following up on complaints, and top on their coffee and harvest table! Woollies, you are definitely forgiven!

Hubby figured out how to take care the sheet cycling of our toddler last night. He picked her up while she was fighting him, saying she wants her Mama, and cocooned her into her blankets. That sorted the open sleeping for most of last night!
He came back down the stairs and told me: “Sometimes fathers are also worth something! We can also do good parenting!”
Of course! I have never thought otherwise!
I could not have done it without you! (Thank you! Thank you, Dries!)

Best of all for the end of this week: I am featured as a Mommalicious Mommy Blogger and had to answer a couple of questions! I love checking in to Mommalicious Mammas active page to see what all mommies are up to, and sometimes to ask a question as well.

I could even sent one of my favourite bloggers, Mama Poekie, who blogs at Authentic Parenting, to the website to ask for advice about gynecologists in Cape Town. She is going to come from the Congo for the check-ups and birth!

Hope you have a wonderful weekend!

What are you up to? What are you drinking?

Sheet cycling

It is colder here at night with winter especially making it known at night. It is vests and layers and socks...

It is not as easy convincing the Toddler of the same fact!
She is forever getting rid of her shoes and socks, and clothes. The birthday suit bandit!

We have to convince her it is winter here!

But the worst is at night. We can’t seem to keep the sheets and blankets over her. She starts cycling with her legs until she lies all in the open (cold). She wakes up and she is little freezing ice blocks. When I tell her she has freezing icicles, she sniggers and puts that little ice blocks of hands on me!

It means that she wakes up more at night, and we have to cover up. When she lands in bed between us, poor Daddy ends up with no bedding, most of the times...  (It seems I have a better grip! Wink smile!) We have to contend with cycling legs every now and again and getting the sheets back... And again...

When I go and lie with her, it is the same story! But I find that it is a bit easier keeping us covered!  I do cherish the co-sleeping, but definitely not the open-sleeping!

 When does this sheet cycling behaviour stops? She is older, but at nearly two and a half, it seems it is some unconscious thing still going on at night. Cycling the legs until there are no sheets or blankets left!

Winter is only beginning, and the nights are really cold! Brrr...

The Toddler is down at 8

 

We had some sleeping issues during the holidays last week.  As soon as the regular routine gets shifted or moved along by a couple of minutes hours, everything goes out of the window!

No new revelation here! We all know it! It is our own doing (as parents!) when we let it slip... We were driving around again on Monday night while she was full of beans, singing songs...  While we were feeling like zombie parents driving ourselves into a coma...

Luckily when she went back to day care this week she was extremely tired, and it is now the second night that she went to bed at eight AND fell asleep immediately... Back-to-reality does have its merits for tired parents!

The photos are evidence of some of the late night art being done by the Toddler last week. She starts by cutting up pictures from magazines and making collages. Even the dices got a place on the collage. I think it is pretty nifty because she does it all on her own!
(The same as the collage on her sketch pad as well.)

Happy sleeps!

Questions on a Sunday night

There are a few questions that a Sunday night brings to mind. Especially after I stumbled in a daze out of our room at 11pm, after having started the evening in the Toddler’s room… It was one of those sleep marathons, where we ended up sleeping before the Toddler!


The rhetorical questions:
(I don’t think there is an answer to one of them, but you are welcome to give me your answers. Wink smile!)

• Why the Toddler does fall asleep even before her bed-time on Friday and Saturday night, but on Sunday it’s a different story?
• Why does the weekend seem like an unlimited opportunity for doing those tasks that need to be done, and comes Sunday night it has not been done?
• Why do the weekends feel so very short?
• Why The Teen does have so many appointments to go to on a weekend when we have specifically declared it a stay-at-home weekend?
• Why do I plan to fit in some exercise over the weekend, but it never realizes?
• Why do we love weekends so much more than the week? (Does it say something about our jobs?)

Monday already!
Yeah, the weekend is only four sleeps away!

Chainsaw in the bedroom

I am a very good sleeper. I love sleeping, and have never struggled going to sleep. There is nothing that is more satisfying than SLEEP!

That is, until I got pregnant again, and since then I was more awake than I wanted. First with the uncomfortable pregnant belly, and then the baby and the nightly sleep deprivations...

I became aware of something else as well. Something which did not bother me at all before... There is a Chainsaw in the bedroom. It is real and it is very very LOUD! It makes sleeping very difficult! To drift away in that wonderful magical world of SLEEP... Very difficult!

I am lucky that as soon as I break into the threshold of sleep, I am away for the night.

To get there is the problem.

Ways I try to deal with the Chainsaw:

• Nudge or poke or stroke of the offending noise maker.

• Trying to straighten the cushion for another sleep position.

• Putting the cushion over my own ears.

• I have on occasion gone to sleep in the Toddler’s room. (It seems the Chainsaw does not bother her at all when she lies next to it!)

• When trying to verbalize the problem, I only get back that I have my own Chainsaw melodies... “sigh”

• On occasion I have tried to record it, and strangely it has worked very well. The offender wakes up, or the sounds are not that loud anymore...

The Toddler is growing up, and our broken sleep is getting less and less. With that of course the impact of the Chainsaw will grow less and less. There is real hope here! (Smile)

Until then, what other remedies do you suggest for dealing with snoring?

Sleep adventures

I have just spent an hour with the toddler on the bed, and now Dad is trying some more. Another hour has passed already, and we are still hearing the giggle from the bedroom...

Sleep stays an “adventure” every night! Sometime she announces that she is going to bed, and we have to move to walk with her up the steps. Even when it is before her bed time. We do try to keep to the bed times! Sometimes she asks for “booby” and falls asleep on the breast. And it’s easy...

But sometimes we get nights, like tonight, where nothing helps! Especially when we have decided to drink that second glass of wine... Murphy does keep his ears wide open, you know!

Nowadays she also wakes up with a scream when she sees we are not sleeping next to her!

Sorry, have to go make a bottle... Dad has just sent me a sms from the bedroom.

Fifty minutes later, but Little Miss and Dad are finally down for the night. I had to lie down as well. Yawn!
Who says that sleeping with the toddler is not a fun adventure? (Sarcastic smile)

Now all that’s left is get myself off to bed...

Good night!

(Photo: Mieka earlier today, fast asleep on the coach!)

Related posts:
Cuddle at bedtime or cry-it-out babbies
List of tactics to get them to sleep

Three days left – we can do this!

Mieka playing with the dog's bed this afternoon, and Benji, the new addition to our family

The holidays are three days away. We can smell it already!

I had my “shopping day” today. Once a year we get an extra shopping day, instead of our normal afternoon off a month. It is a huge bonus, and we plan long before the time on how to spend it.

We had some rainy weather the past couple of days which has been a huge relief. How I wished this morning that we did not make any plans... But the teen had me booked for a manicure at eight o’clock - a Christmas present from her. Guess what? We were on our way, and the friend (whom she wanted to support) cancelled on us! We could have spent a bit lot longer in bed!

We went to the shops and tried to do some Christmas shopping. It is very difficult with a busy toddler. It is not getting easier. No, she is getting busier, and we have to keep a constant watch! I have a renewed respect for ALL mothers who get their shopping done with toddlers in tow.

We could show some shopping bags at the end of our shopping excursion. Which I am very proud off! It feels like an accomplishment of sorts! (Huge smile!)

I also had an afternoon nap on this Monday afternoon with the toddler. It was one of the best afternoons in a very long time! Sleep is not overrated here! No, it is more precious than gold! And I could spend some time with the toddler. She is extremely cute nowadays. I think this is the cutest time in a child’s life!

When do you think are they their cutest?

Only Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday that lay ahead. Thursday is a public holiday here this week! Then HOLIDAYS and time with the family and toddler!

Related post:
Things to consider when shopping with the toddler

Wordless Wednesday #52 - Breakfast at Olivia's with sleeping toddler