Sleep: Part 6570

But seriously, when you have a 14 year old and an 18 year old, you don’t think those delightful offspring of yours will be contributing to your sleep, or lack of. Right?

Wrong.

So, so wrong.

My children are beasts. I’ve said that from the start, way back when I was blogging on March of Dimes Share Your Story. My complaints about my children’s sleep habits are legendary in some circles.

In fact, once I met some of the women from MOD SYS they ‘joked’ that I needed our yearly conferences just so I could sleep through the night with a bed all to myself.

You know what’s not funny anymore?

Being woken up several times a night for many nights in a row by my children.

These children, need I remind you, are TEENAGERS.

And still they wake me up through the night.

Summer has wrought havoc on O’s sleep schedule.

Tom lets her sleep until 11:30 or noon each day, which means when I’m heading to bed at 9:30 or 10 (let’s remember, I’m not on summer break, so I still get up no later than 6 each morning) she’s nowhere near ready to go to sleep.

I don’t want to drug her (aka, give her Tylenol PM) each night to make her ‘sleepy’ when I go to bed. That’s not fair or right.

But I also don’t want to make her go to bed when I do so that she can toss and turn for HOURS, flashing her freaking book light (she sleeps with a book light instead of a teddy bear) across the ceiling, into the hall, down the street, into the attic, everywhere that will annoy me and keep me from sleeping well.

Have I mentioned before that I really like it to be DARK when I sleep? As in, please don’t shine your book light into my eyes and ask me if I’m awake.

Sigh.

So that’s the younger beast.

The older beast, the ADULT beast, has been working four days a week since the week after her graduation party (so, like two weeks…) She works 4pm to midnight. Which sounds great, right?

Except in the two weeks she’s worked this schedule, she has texted me no earlier than 9:45 on several nights to say she’s going to come home at midnight, shower and then go to a friend’s house. The friend is either Tessa or N. So that’s fun.

I don’t actually care that she’s going to friends’ houses, I just wish she’d make this decision before 9:30 each night so that I’m not jolted out of my falling asleep routine and made to make decisions, replies, what have you, past the point where I can function as a decent human being.

The most recent event, the one that broke the jumping sheep’s back, was a night when I’d declared to Olivia that I was going to bed at 9:30 and she was going to stay up with her dad until she was decently tired enough to JUST GO TO SLEEP. Ahem. Yes.

So I went up, Olivia followed me long enough to get her teeth brushed and her orthodontic rubber bands put in and then she bolted back to her tablet. Lucky me, I settled in and fell asleep before 10:30, which is a freaking record these days.

12:15: Alyssa came in. “Mom?” she whispered. “They let us go a half hour early. N’s home for four days. Can I go to Twyla’s house and see her?”

I mumbled that that was fine, but was she coming home or spending the night with N?

She said, “I don’t know yet. I’ll text you.”

“No,” I insisted. “I either won’t get it until morning or it will wake me up (I didn’t say AGAIN, but I thought it.) Decide now and leave your dad a note so he doesn’t come up at 3am to tell me you’re not home and demand to know if I know where you are.”

She agreed to these terms and off she went. Ten minutes later, I heard Olivia making her way upstairs.

A half hour after that, I woke up again to Alyssa whispering to me. “Mom? They movie they were watching at Tyla’s was just finishing when I got there so I came home brought N with me.”

I struggled to wake up AGAIN and asked, “Did you leave your dad a note about N being here?”

She told me she did.

At that point, I realized that bathroom light was on and asked her what the hell Olivia was doing in there.

She said that Liv was sitting on the toilet.

I pulled my tired ass out of bed and went to the bathroom to whine at O. She grudgingly made her way to her bed where I insisted that she either turn off that damned book light or place it somewhere (under her pillow, for example) it wouldn’t shine across the entire room.

At that point, I think everyone went to sleep and I didn’t wake up again until my alarm went off at 5:10. So…I got about 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep. Must be a record.

Honestly, it hasn’t been this bad since Olivia was 8 years old.