BedtimeI am getting fed up with New Year! New You! magazine articles telling me that the secret to happiness, health, success is a good night’s sleep.

Simple!

Great!

How???

The only suggestions they have on how to achieve this are things reserved for the childless: enjoying a warm bath, clearing the room of any distractions, blah, blah, blah.

Can’t wait for my darling itchy boy to read one of these and to understand how important it is for me to get some decent sleep.  In the meantime, I guess I will have to put up with being woken up 3-4 nights of the week to apply more cream, wipe his nose, give him a cuddle or whatever reason he has dreamt up.

I know that leaving a child to settle themselves is a great idea and one that is highly recommended to achieve a blissful life for both parents and child.  The difficulty with an itchy child is that you cannot leave them to soothe themselves when soothing themselves involves scratching at their skin until it bleeds.

MyItchyBoy knows that scratching is not good, which helps me look at my sleeplessness in a positive light.  Ultimately, waking me up to apply more cream is the best course of action when he is feeling itchy.  He even feels happy enough to wake me up, despite my often surly approach to putting on a lamp and whipping out the emollient.  I do try to be supportive and considerate of his distress or discomfort but sometimes it is hard when it is freezing cold and all you want to do is get back to sleep.

I hope in time that his skin will clear up.  If not, I hope that in time he will be able to apply his own cream in the middle of the night so that I, in turn, will finally get a good night’s sleep.

  

MyItchyBoy

My son has atopic eczema and he reacts badly to dairy, soya and we are slowly working towards him eating eggs again. He's had a mild anaphylactic reaction to peanuts and has regular flare-ups to random things that we rarely manage to pinpoint. I started the blog to share my experiences and frustrations of having an itchy boy.

2 Responses to Sleep is apparently great for you – if you can get it!

  1. Have you tried using Derma Silk childrens gloves?

    on March 8, 2013 at 4:12 pm Val Lees

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