You can't have nightmares if you never SLEEEEP...!

We've had a couple of shocking days here. We had a horror 5:00am morning yesterday because these two little cherubs are sleeping in the same room.
If you've recently joined my blog, they're sleeping in the cot room together because first this happened, then this, then this, and if you can believe it, this happened next. I promise I am not making this up. The whole thing is pretty much ongoing, with one or two detours along the way.

Now for my readers from the northern hemisphere, please remember that right now, we're heading into Autumn/Fall and things are DARK and middle-of-the-night-ish at 5:00 am. So getting up then, waking one's baby sister, turning on the light and mucking around with toys while the sister cries is not the diplomatic thing to do.

Now because of the awful 5:00am morning, yesterday I read the riot act (not enough sleep makes Mummy cranky) and last night we gave him a long and serious pep-talk about when he wakes up: if it's dark he must just lie there, NO WAY may he turn the light on, and he must not wake Chubbity Bubbity up under any circumstances.

Improvement? Of course not!

Overnight I was woken three times to give Chubbity Bubbity drinks of water or cover her up. So when I saw their bedroom light on and heard the sounds of Riotous Sibling Mucking-Up at 4:30am this morning, I despaired. Did they get back to sleep again? Of course not! What a silly question. And frankly, I'm surprised at you for even asking it.

I was up to them six times between 4:30 and 5:15, optimistically thinking if I was scary enough, I'd get them to stop mucking up and lie down, hoping that they would realise that they were as tired as their Mummy was and they were really quite tired.

However, as I am the only person in the family who has not has a good sleep since 20th March 2005, they did not have this motivation to break up the party, so they kept going strong.

At 6:00am, I got up, put my contact lenses in, took my blood presure medication (just a little medical distraction from pest control), took my Nurofen for the sleep-deprivation headache I wake up with each day, and got Sonny Ma-Jiminy to help me with the vacuuming of his room prior to moving back in.

Today is the day, I promised myself, that this charade finishes. I am now 101% sure the bedbugs have all gone, and therefore he must move into his own room. It's easier to squash early morning high spirits when he's alone without his Number One Fan giggling at everything he says and does.

So here it is: Sonny's room, livable again. His makeshift chest-of-drawers with all his clothes is still in the kitchen (yeah, that's been so convenient!) and sundry other possessions are on the front balcony covered with a tarpaulin or under the back deck in black plastic bags, but the important thing is the bed is in there! And he sleeps in it! Alone!

Our room has no bed yet, but we will sleep in there tonight to check if the bugs have all gone. The scientific method by which you discover if they have indeed all gone is to sleep in there and to see if you get savaged while you sleep. Even then, it's not 100% fail-safe - there could potentially be eggs somewhere in the room, waiting for you to re-stock your furniture and move back in so they can hatch and start feeding on you.

If you can't kill them before they have five feeds on you, shedding their skin each time, they will be of an age to lay more eggs. But we are so confident that we've broken their reproductive cycle that after sleeping in there a few times without being savaged, we'll buy our new bed and move back in.

Then I'll treat myself to a big big sleep. A pre-20/03/2005 sleep. The thought of that sleep has been the only thing helping me to put one foot in front of the other these last few weeks.