Sleep dreams


Sleep dreams

Before my second son arrived in February 2013, I was anxious about the inevitable sleep deprivation so I was keen to bank as many hours in bed as possible. And that meant ensuring my eldest son wasn’t awake with the larks. He’d just moved out of the nursery and into a big boy room giving me the opportunity to create a super sleep-friendly environment. My first thought was to order a blackout roller blind. All well and good until it was installed and I discovered that, although the material itself didn’t let any light through, the mechanism of the blind meant that the fabric didn’t stretch right to the edge of the window frame. Chinks of light were creeping through at either side. Enough light was getting in that the room didn’t feel very dark.

What could I do?

I needed to block out the light because I had trained number one son to sleep in the dark. Not being able to find an existing solution available to buy, I started hanging towels and folded up children’s sleeping bags down the sides of the blinds. Having researched this problem, I now know that other people have found many a creative solution – click here for some more thoughts on this. Then it hit me, if I could just hook something over the top of the blind to bridge the gap that was allowing the light in it would be much quicker, easier and effective than stuffing anything I could get my hands on down the sides of the roller blind. A rummage round the house produced some basic materials and 10 minutes later the first, very rudimentary, pair of BlindSides™ was born.

Some months later, here we are with the fully-finished product, ready to help all those other people and their children who get their best sleep when all light is excluded from the bedroom. The irony is my eldest has now discovered a fear of the dark and wants to sleep with a light on…