Elusive sleep can be a fickle little creature

I HAVE just woken up from a full night's sleep and I am exhausted.

It's not because I am the mother of a small child.

Those dark days of snatching sleep for two-hour bursts are mercifully behind me and I now have a baby who sleeps for 12 hours at a stretch (yes, the first night that happens you do really believe in the existence of God).

While most people wake up naturally, habitually or by an alarm clock going off once, I have reflected on my situation as I lay in a groggy pre-dawn haze this morning and realised I get woken up each morning by four different individuals, at four very different times and in four different ways.

Usually it starts with the cat, Dave. He's the early riser in our household and after sleeping most of the day, he ideally would like to be up and about and enjoying his cornflakes at 3am.

Thanks to some personality conflicts with a fat cat with sharp claws over the fence, Dave's cat door is now closed overnight.

This situation has been in place for about six months, but this does not stop Dave banging at his cat door in the kitchen loudly every morning in the hope it may one day miraculously open for him. Or that his (usually but not at 3am) loving owner might pad down the dark hallway and let him out.

Since this never happens, he usually waits till I drift off to sleep again before deciding the next best option to prowling the mean pre-dawn streets is to curl up and go back to sleep. On my face.

By the time we've negotiated a compromise and he's tucked quietly in my arms, my partner's alarm goes off. For the first time. For the next 30 minutes I have perfected the art of falling asleep in 10-minute bursts.

Eventually he stops snoozing and gets up, prompting Dave to have another crack at getting outside, however this time there is also the now closed bedroom door to get opened, which he achieves by scratching on the washing basket till I wake up (again) and let him out.

Finally cosy with the bed to myself, I fall asleep, which is the cue for our dog, Greta, to wake up, stretch, shake her ears loudly beside my head and resettle herself. This wouldn't be a problem except her ear shaking is so loud it has been known to wake the baby all the way down the hall.

I'm nothing if not resolute when presented with a challenge, so despite the odds being seriously stacked against me, I am still determined to go back to sleep.

The moment this is achieved it is then, of course, a respectable 7am and the baby of the house (the only one who seems to have set his circadian rhythms to anything remotely acceptable to me) stirs and that's it - time to give up, and get up - three or four hours after I was first woken up.

If staying awake is tiring, try staying asleep at our place.

Of course the solution might be to simply to go to bed early and get up early as well, but sleep is a capricious little creature and will often deny us when it is most needed at bed time and then refuse to leave our side when the alarm clock has been snoozing for 40 minutes in the morning.

The sensible thing would be to kick the entire menagerie out of the bedroom and into the spare room.

But there is something special about the feel of a whisker against your cheek, the quiet, huffy snores of an old dog on the floor and the warm body of someone you love beside you that makes waking up bearable, no matter how many times you have to do it each morning.

Eva Bradley is an award-winning columnist and photographer, who runs Napier-based Eva Bradley Photography.