Our life is a million miles an hour. For years I have made the same new year's resolution. 2 out of 4 weekends must be kept free. But every year, we book up our calendar with lovely things and life continues at break neck speed. The trouble is I love it. I thrive on it, it was the same when I worked in an office. I was at my best when I was running around like a headless chicken! Here we are on the 21st May and we don't have a single weekend free until mid September!

But whether it's having children, moving house 3 times in a year or juggling three part time jobs, (You do the maths...!) I need some calm in my life. It's fair to say that taking on the responsibility of a 300 year old house has been an eye opener. We love it, we love it as it is and we love it for what it can be. It's the transition period that's more tricky. You have all these grand plans, things to do now, things for a year's time, things for your retirement! 

And slowly we are working through a giant, house shaped to do list. 

Every wall needs repainting, every bit of skirting needs sanding or replacing, there's a few holes that leak, a few bowls that get put out in the conservatory and on one of the window seats. We have barely touched upstairs, unless you count my over eager fingers ripping up the carpets in our bedroom and peeling off a little tempting corner of ceiling paper in the bathroom. Richard was not impressed. 

Downstairs feels more like us, we've renovated the grown up lounge and family dining room and given the conservatory-now-playroom a quick budget update. But our bedroom is a mess. Floorboards half sanded, the remnants of the sticky underlay around the skirting boards. All our old dark wooden furniture, that we bought especially for the extension at our old house, now completely swamps our more delicate country room. There are always piles of clothes to put away, a leftover weekend bag on the floor. We seem to pack up as much as we unpack at the moment! It feels temporary and unloved but it's a sanctuary.

We collapse into bed each night with relief. We hear elephant footsteps almost every night, sometimes one set, sometimes two, from the boys' attic room, heading down to the comfort of our bed. All Winter we've had an electric blanket cranked up to the max and now the warmer weather has come we've started to appreciate what a lovely room we have. The dual aspect windows show us the reason we moved here. Birds, trees, breeze. A garden strewn with toys, that changes with the seasons. And we realised we need to make more of this room. Even if a bathroom makeover and renovation are a while away.

So I was so happy when I found a new friend on Instagram and jumped at the chance to share their beautiful bedding range with you. The Secret Linen Store shouldn't be a secret. I want to shout it from the rooftops! Remember that feeling as a child of slipping into a sleeping bag, that shiny cocoon feeling of being wrapped up in slinky cotton wool? Well imagine a grown up version! 

Molly and Harriet are two sisters (with 87 fish between them - yes I love a good about us page) who have founded something to be proud of. Exquisite, exclusive and understated designs you won't find anywhere else with a passion for thread counts. Rich and I rely more and more on the internet since living in a rural village and even more so on couriers collecting our returns! I like to be able to see and feel things before I buy them and almost every bedding company never offers samples before you buy.

Well not with the Secret Linen Store you can order free samples to rub between your fingers, compare with your interior decor and as many as you like! 

All the range has that elusive calming element that we have been so desperate for. A palette of sumptuous, luxurious prints and patterns for your elegant space. I am completely drawn to blues, and knew straight away the Meadow Indigo Blue Cotton set was the one for us. I love that you can turn the duvet over and have the alternative colour way, and that the pillow cases are extra roomy! Line dry it and you don't have to iron it too! 

From the moment the potato sack packaging arrived I knew I would love it. Harriet and Molly have thought of every detail. The sample packaging, little extras, tea bags in a stripy paper bag and their unique branding is effortlessly stamped over every little detail. 

They have sourced the best suppliers in Portugal to share something you can't find on the high street. At incredible prices! They even know that most of us shop in the wonderful world that is IKEA and have a range especially for their speciality sizes. They are very honest that there's no fancy shop, no big warehouse and no middle men. 

The first day we put the bedding set on we ended up going back to bed for a nap!!! I don't think we have ever done that before! For the first time in a long time I'm heading to bed with a cup of tea and a favourite magazine to read cover to cover. The one o' clock bedtimes are slowly fading into the past at last! It's funny how when you change your surroundings you can change your routine. Sometimes you need to be something to force you to go slow. 

The house doesn't let us change it quickly. There's planning restrictions and immense preparations every time. But it's a good thing! 

We need an excuse to slow down. To let the dogs upstairs for a treat on a Sunday when we wake up at home. Mabel isn't keen at all of course... no wait, she'd sleep with us every night if we let her!

I've always lived by the philosophy of making the most of what you've got and something simple like updating our bedding has transformed our room! I stacked up my favourite old issues of magazines I want to read again on the bedside table and this weekend I am going to relish a lazy Saturday with no reason to get up, other than to make my boys breakfast in bed and bring it back upstairs. 

And maybe let the westies up too!

The Secret Linen Store have also just launched a range of children's bedding. I love that they have developed designs that will grow with your children. No characters that are loved one birthday and out of favour the next. Timeless, classic yet contemporary prints and colours that will bring an interior flair to your kiddies rooms. 

And I have a special give-away for you too! The Secret Linen Store have 2 cushion covers of your choice to WIN! All you have to do is leave a comment on this post, this Instagram photo or Facebook post. Now what will you choose?!

The competition is open until the end of May, which colour way do you love the most?

Ooh and head over to the Secret Linen Store website - there's 10% off for the bank holiday weekend! 

Thank you to the Secret Linen Store for our beautiful bedding.

We always say when we walk around a supermarket that you can spot a newborn parent. There's a mum gently swaying with her trolley (with no baby in it) because it's become quite normal to rock back and forwards as if you are at sea. Then there's a dad at the checkout who appears to be sleeping with his eyes open, getting 20 seconds of rest whilst the kind checkout person offers to help pack the bags. You head into parenthood knowing it's going to be tiring. Everyone joked when I was waddling like a penguin at 8 months pregnant, "Get those lie-ins in while you can, kiss goodbye to those full nights of sleep!"

What we didn't expect was that, 6 years down the line, we would feel just as exhausted as those early days! Ok, so we are not up pacing the hallway, singing lullabies and squirting milk onto our forearms, leaving little splodges all over the carpet, but almost every night we hear a little cry, sometimes a whimper, sometimes a scream, followed by a thud as one or both of the boys clamber out of bed and head to us.

Our boys have never been – what I have enviously read about others' children – "good sleepers". Since we moved last September, I can probably count on one hand how many nights they have slept for a solid 8 or so hours. I worry when they stay over with grandparents that they will wake with a nightmare and Sammy is missing out on sleepovers with his friends because we just don't trust that he wouldn't need us to drive over in the middle of the night to settle him. And sleep deprivation does horrible things to you, doesn't it?! Suddenly you want to cry at the foot of the stairs when you realise you've dropped a sock from the pile of washing in your arms back up on the top step. Little things just tip you over the edge. We become a house of crocodiles all snapping at each other, Rich and I competing for the coveted title of 'Most Tired 2015'. Of course there's no prize for the winner, but still we spar back and forwards over how many times each of us got up to tuck them back in, who had one of them snuggled into us, running their cold feet up and down your calves at 3am, and who got relegated to their bed in the attic room. 

And then when I'm lying in the darkness at 4am, stroking those floppy locks and feeling my pyjamas soaked against my skin with their tears, I realise they aren't waking up on purpose. That when you have a bad dream (last night it was about caterpillars), you just need a cuddle, a human security blanket, like puppies who curl up in a pile, sharing the comfort of hearing each other's heartbeats.

Motherhood is tough, parenthood is tough. I remember sharing those grainy selfies in the middle of the night, as a cry for help, and being so thankful for the positive comments from all the other mums and dads out there going through the same. For us those times aren't just contained to when they are poorly or a handful of odd occasions, it's almost every single night. And sleep is the one thing you can't do without! We've even tried pushing their beds together to make a big double for them but they still prefer piling in with us. Ollie loves to wriggle into the curve of your body, with his head in the crook of my arm, and Sammy would quite happily sleep on my chest every night, like a newborn. And if he creeps in without me noticing, which his stealth like feet does manage on occasions, he loves to climb on my back, like a baby turtle, to be the closest he possibly can.

So I was thrilled to be asked to represent Slumberdown this year as one of their Ambassadors, alongside 2 of my favourite bloggers Katie from Mummy Daddy Me and Tara from the Sticky Fingers Blog. I need help, we need help, but we are not sure quite what to do. We keep saying, oh Sammy is still so little at 6, he won't be wanting to sleep with his mummy when he's 13, but I'm not sure that's a sustainable answer for our broken nights! When we moved we knew it was going to be another change to deal with, another unsettled time, so we raced to redecorate their attic bedroom first, a joint big boys' room, with new bits and their favourite familiar old bits. They'd had their own rooms in our last house but wanted to share a room when we finally moved in. If you fancy a nose you can see their aeroplane bedroom tour here!

Slumberdown appreciate that there are all sorts of reasons why we have trouble sleeping. As part of their commitment to helping every family to get a better night's sleep, they teamed up with Professor Jason Ellis PHD who is the Professor of Sleep Science at Northumbria University, to bring you The Sleep Clinic. Now it may seem obvious, what we need to do to get more sleep, but do we actually do them in practise. Rich and I sit up on our phones, I regularly take one more peek at my Facebook, Instagram and Twitter feeds with the light of the screen hidden under the duvet at gone midnight. 

I'd never thought about buying us all different pillows based on the way we sleep. It hadn't crossed my mind that there are pillows specially designed for people like me who sleep on their front, or for Rich who always sleeps on his side. We use the same duvet all year round, out of habit, and it hadn't really occurred to me that changing the tog of our duvet for the changing seasons could help our tired bodies!

Over the next year we are going to be road testing the fantastic range of Slumderdown products, carrying out some family sleep challenges, I will try and keep the no make up-hair like a bird's nest first thing in the morning photos to a minimum, in the hope that we can really make a difference to our sleeping patterns. 

We use the phrase, we just can't go on like this for much longer. There's only so long we can cope with our hectic work lives, busy family weekends and the house renovations on broken sleep. We are going to test out all the advice from The Sleep Clinic, trial a week of no screens in the bedroom, (I have warned my husband this is a sleep trial, not an excuse for any funny business trial!) getting to bed earlier, ditching the mid week drinks habit we've slipped into and lots of other ideas to help settle the boys at night.

I always remember my Granny and Grandpa had feather duvets. They were so well loved, I'd notice a couple of feathers float out onto the floor every time we visited, but they just felt so sumptuous, like a luxurious cuddle from a cloud when you were tucked into bed. I love that Slumberdown have their own range of goose and duck feather quilts and pillows which, even the boys, noticed were different from their regular covers. We snapped some photos before we made up the beds and even the woofers wanted to get in the action! No no no! As much as we love you, we are not spoiling you westies with feathers in your stinky bed! Even if you are super cute. 

Make sure you follow Slumberdown on Twitter and Facebook. They have great competitions to win products for your family running all the time! 

In fact you can enter here to win new pillows and duvets for your entire family! Check the site for full terms and conditions. Good luck! I'll be hosting some fab giveaways too, so make sure you check back in soon. 

So what are your sleep problems? Do your kids sleep through? Are you one of the lucky ones?! I'd love to hear what keeps you up at night. Sometimes my head is so spinning with ideas I have to keep a pen and notepad next to me, so I don't end up with them whirring through my brain all night!

I am so happy to be part of the Slumberdown family this year, here's to hopefully finally getting our sleep issues under control! If only there were this quiet and angelic every night! 

There is nothing more beautiful and simple to me than picking flowers from the garden and decorating the window ledges and mantlepiece with little vases. So when one of my favourite interiors companies Rose and Grey asked me to take part in their styling challenge I couldn't resist!

The jam jar vase concept has taken the wedding world by storm but these wild flower jars come complete with a wired frame lid to hold your flowers in place. Genius! No need for a cello tape frame with these babies, just pick and go.

The boys helped me with the first idea and collected old snail shells from around the garden, Slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails, that is indeed what my boys are made of! I found a travel shampoo plastic bottle in the bathroom and used it to create an inner vase.

Take your jar and place your water filled bottle inside. It's much tricker to fill with water afterwards. Place your snail shells around the bottle and add your flowers. The boys decided to pick these wild flowers (or weeds!) and add them to the vase. 

I loved the idea of filling the vase with something other than water and have been waiting for an excuse to use this dried petal confetti. This time I used an old florist's tube which was the perfect height for the jar. 

I'd recommend placing the rubber top on the tube as you fill the jar with confetti and then removing it before you add your flowers. 

But the easiest idea of all is to decorate with wallpaper samples. Just cut slim strips of paper from your favourite print and attach with stickers. I used ribbon to hang a jar full of apple blossom in the apple tree at the bottom of the garden. So simple but would be lovely for a Summer garden party!

I love them all but I think the confetti filled vase steals my heart! Even if I have left a trail of tiny petals behind me!

There are so many lovely entries for this styling challenge, Rose and Grey are sharing them on their Twitter feed so make sure you follow them for the most amazing interiors inspiration.