Three more sleeps to go and Tam is back at school. Lots to do. With the biggest thing to achieve is to get Tam back in the routine of getting ready and going to school.

Well its Tuesday morning at 5am and things have been calmer tonight. No biting, kicking. Calm and simple tea, lots of cuddles and a beautiful thank you at the end. Then Tam asked to go to bed and dragged me off with him. I knew he had not slept much the night before and was more worried about him getting some sleep than having a broken night. So at 6pm he was asleep and stayed that way until midnight. Kinda what I expected.

This weekend has been terrible for sleep. Tam has soldiered on with about 4 hours sleep total. It’s Sunday evening and I have been trying to talk to him about sleep and it has degraded into him attacking me. I have a bit mark on my hand and a cut on my nose. Everything I have done to calm him down has failed. I have him in bed with a red led strip under the bed and he is crying and tossing around. It breaks my heart. He has school tomorrow and the lack of sleep worries me as it can affect…

On any day of the week when Tam comes in from school he follows a very prescribed path of tasks and objectives.

Its 5am and another night of Tam being petrified to sleep. He seems to be having terrible nightmares which lead to him screaming while he is asleep and wetting the bed. He is inconsolable when I wake him and sobs and will not allow me to hug him or even touch him. I will have that to deal with when he runs out of steam. Right now he is absolutely shattered and fighting sleep like a trooper.

Its the start of September and six weeks of holiday are nearly done. Only a few days left and a lot to do. Not least is to get Tam back into getting ready for school at the right time. That feels like an impossible tasks at the moment. Today is another day with no sleep. First of September and its 5am. No sleep. I have tried melatonin but he just got upset. I tried to keep him in bed but that became a fight. Right now he is wired, running around and aggravated. I am knackered and wondering when…

The Kubler-Ross definition of the stages of grief are listed as Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. I understand the principle behind these stages but they are very much a simplification of the grieving process. Everyone grieves differently and the cause of the grief also causes the grief to rotate in different directions.

Over the past two couple of years I have kept a log of Tams sleeping patterns. It is part of a larger journal that I write in everyday. I write the challenges, the wins, what’s worrying me and lots of other things. The contents of the journal is not something that I would be willing to share as a whole but one section of it has been very useful.