Sleepless In Stamford

We took G to Stamford in Lincolnshire for the weekend, to visit some friends. On Saturday afternoon we went along to Burghley House, where G enjoyed meeting a very sociable deer, as the picture shows.

Saturday night wasn't nearly as successful, as we suffered through G's worst night for sleeping since she was a little baby. After waking up after midnight and spotting us in the room with her, she didn't seem inclined to go back to sleep. This isn't unusual when we're away with G, and after a while we got her up and let her play with Mrs J's phone for a bit, in the hope she'd want to go back to sleep soon enough.

But she didn't. Attempts to put her back in her travel cot were met with whining, crying and, after an hour or two, wholesale screaming. At one stage I took G downstairs whereupon she howled for her mummy, huge fat tears plopping down her cheeks, and got herself so worked up she started struggling to breathe. I went on a mercy dash to the car to pick up an In The Night Garden DVD, and after a couple of soothing episodes she finally went down to sleep at about 6am.

This was bad enough, but Mrs J and her friends were due to run a 10k in Sherwood Forest later that morning. After three hours sleep Mrs J not only managed to get to the start, but completed the course in her best time ever, while I joined a tired but surprisingly not-too-grouchy G in cheering her on from the sidelines. I drove home afterwards though. G slept all the way.