When sleeping through the night suddenly stops

One thing I really took for granted before I had a child was sleep.

In my younger days, I'd easily do a 40 hours job, and then another 20 hours as a bar supervisor in the evenings, with weekends working from 6pm til 3am. And I'd still function as a normal human being.

Just the thought of all those hours and staying awake that much makes me want to crawl into a duvet cocoon and sleep for 12 hours as a treat to past me.

Then of course I had a baby, and he hasn't been the best of sleepers I have to admit. We spent many, many months co-sleeping (or bed sharing) which I was totally fine with, though as he got older it did become less and less comfortable. In those early days with a newborn, we experienced many sleepless nights. More nights than I can count where I was stood gently swaying to coax him to sleep. And lots of tears of sleep deprivation. And don't even get me started on sleep regression and teething!

However, around the one year old mark, sleep started to change for us.

Henry would go to sleep without being held and rocked.
And when he woke in the night he didn't need milk or water, just his dummy and laying him back down.

And then.... he stopped waking in the night. It was a sleep deprived mothers dream come true.

Unfortunately this tale does have a plot twist.

He does still wake a few nights a week, but it's for about two minutes, enough time to pop his dummy back in, and then he's out again. And I can cope with that just fine.

However, we've had a few rough nights.
The sleeping through stopped.
And we were up four, five, six, and more times, getting him to go back to sleep.
I think this peaked with him waking every 10 minutes in a two hours period between 12am and 2am.
I was exhausted. And so was Dann.

We'd gotten used to sleep, and we loved it. We'd started to take it for granted again, and we were punished with several nights of hell.
There was also a cough involved which didn't help the situation - I blame nursery.

Obviously I'm well aware that we're going to have to get used to the distrubed sleep again soon with a second due in the summer, but I'm not ready yet! I need those extra months to mentally prepare me for the sleep battle!
Plus naps were invented for a reason!

Luckily (and with my finger firmly crossed), normal night time service has resumed in the Bradford household, but boy was it a shock to the system.