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.
A mom, a dad and two daughters. We're living ordinary lives with a twist of 5p- (Cri du Chat) for spice. But we're about so much more than our younger daughter's genetic diagnosis.
Showing posts with label Sleep. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sleep. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 22, 2021
Friday, February 28, 2020
Gently
I’ve been really obnoxious lately around bedtime.
I just want to go to sleep and there’s Olivia, giggling over everything, but most especially over her attempts are twerking or something else to do with her butt.
That kid…I swear.
But one recent night was different.
We went to be a little after nine. I unbraided her hair, she ‘toileted’ (that’s what she’s taken to calling the act of peeing in the toilet. I know.) then all the turtles and Bobby the penguin kissed her goodnight.
At that point, I told her I’d be back and I went about my own bedtime routine.
Ten minute or so later, I made my way back toward her bed so that Barbie could sing to her.
Barbie commented that she saw Olivia yawn.
I told Liv that she looked tired.
She asked, “Can you smell someone’s tired?”
I told her that you probably couldn’t smell it but that you can hear it in a person’s voice and you can see it in their face. You can also hear the yawns as well as see them.
She smiled tiredly at me.
After Barbie performed her usual repertoire, she kissed Olivia good night. The turtles kissed her gently and then she asked me if I would touch her face.
Odd request, but okay. I gently rubbed her forehead, cheeks, and scalp. Her eyes got heavy as she relaxed under my touch.
I scratched her back a little and went back to rubbing her face. She fell asleep before five minutes of gentle touching passed.
I think she needed a night of gentleness from me.
I know I needed it too.
I just want to go to sleep and there’s Olivia, giggling over everything, but most especially over her attempts are twerking or something else to do with her butt.
That kid…I swear.
But one recent night was different.
We went to be a little after nine. I unbraided her hair, she ‘toileted’ (that’s what she’s taken to calling the act of peeing in the toilet. I know.) then all the turtles and Bobby the penguin kissed her goodnight.
At that point, I told her I’d be back and I went about my own bedtime routine.
Ten minute or so later, I made my way back toward her bed so that Barbie could sing to her.
Barbie commented that she saw Olivia yawn.
I told Liv that she looked tired.
She asked, “Can you smell someone’s tired?”
I told her that you probably couldn’t smell it but that you can hear it in a person’s voice and you can see it in their face. You can also hear the yawns as well as see them.
She smiled tiredly at me.
After Barbie performed her usual repertoire, she kissed Olivia good night. The turtles kissed her gently and then she asked me if I would touch her face.
Odd request, but okay. I gently rubbed her forehead, cheeks, and scalp. Her eyes got heavy as she relaxed under my touch.
I scratched her back a little and went back to rubbing her face. She fell asleep before five minutes of gentle touching passed.
I think she needed a night of gentleness from me.
I know I needed it too.
Tuesday, February 4, 2020
An Evolution of Sleep
Star date 1/16/20: Three doses in of Lexapro…tonight, our bedtime routine was cut in half.
Backstory: Back in the day, when Alyssa and Olivia slept in the big bed in my room and I slept in a twin next to them, I’d tuck the girls in, do an elaborate singing, scratching, talking routine and finally, FINALLY, they’d both fall asleep.
I transitioned out of that by singing to them, rubbing their backs for a couple of minutes and then telling them I had to go to the bathroom. I’d spend about ten minutes in there and by the time I got back, they’d both be asleep.
Then we moved down the hall (yes, all three of us) to Alyssa’s room. There was a full-sized bed and bunk beds down there. Alyssa, at 10, was thrilled to take the top bunk, Olivia went into the bottom and I slept in the full-sized bed. It was lovely.
Right after she turned fourteen, Alyssa declared that she thought she’d like to sleep alone in her room.
Okay, then.
Olivia and I moved back down to the master bedroom. I got the big (read: queen) bed this time and Olivia sleeps in the twin.
Our bedtime routine has evolved over the years, as it does.
Back before cancer and chemo and all that brought with it, we’d settle on the couch and I’d scratch Olivia’s back/legs/arms (whatever was itchy) until she fell asleep. Some nights it was so frustrating because she’d wiggle, turn, twist, etc. But once she was asleep, I could either carry her to bed or wake her just enough to get her to walk up the stairs and climb into bed herself, going right back to sleep.
Cancer and the exhaustion of treatment put an end to that. After my surgery, I couldn’t sit on the couch with her for an hour and scratch her. At that point, we started just going to upstairs, wide awake, and going to bed that way.
That brought its own struggles, though.
In the past few months, our bedtime routine has been:
Brush teeth, go upstairs, the turtles and bug (stuffed, obviously) kiss her goodnight. I scratch her back for all of ten seconds. I kiss her goodnight. I tell her I have to go take care of things in the bathroom.
I come back ten (or so) minutes later. She’s playing with her book light.
The turtles (Travis, mostly) ask her questions, she gives actual answers. Barbie (a Lego Barbie, just the head and torso) sings Frere Jacques and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. She does this while ‘standing’ on a cube that lights up. She really belts it out on that cube, just saying.
Then Barbie kissed Olivia, Travis, Rosie, Gub and Rupert (all the stuffed turtles/lady bug.)
Then I kiss her goodnight again and scratch her back for another ten seconds and go to my bed.
There she asks me questions for at least a half hour. Sigh.
Finally, I tell her it’s time to try and sleep. She might or might not ask a few more questions. Then we go to sleep.
Sure, it’s exhausting but we sleep through the night, so I’m calling it a win.
Last night, though. The night she took her third pill, I tucked her in. The turtles and Gub kissed her good night. I told her I had to go brush my teeth and gather the next day’s clothes and suggested, gently, that maybe she should just try and sleep while I was doing that.
When I came back, maybe 15 minutes later, she was sound asleep.
Obviously, I don’t know if this sleep change is a one-time event, if it was caused by her still being sort of sick or if it’s a sign of the Lexapro working to settle her brain down. I guess we’ll see.
Backstory: Back in the day, when Alyssa and Olivia slept in the big bed in my room and I slept in a twin next to them, I’d tuck the girls in, do an elaborate singing, scratching, talking routine and finally, FINALLY, they’d both fall asleep.
I transitioned out of that by singing to them, rubbing their backs for a couple of minutes and then telling them I had to go to the bathroom. I’d spend about ten minutes in there and by the time I got back, they’d both be asleep.
Then we moved down the hall (yes, all three of us) to Alyssa’s room. There was a full-sized bed and bunk beds down there. Alyssa, at 10, was thrilled to take the top bunk, Olivia went into the bottom and I slept in the full-sized bed. It was lovely.
Right after she turned fourteen, Alyssa declared that she thought she’d like to sleep alone in her room.
Okay, then.
Olivia and I moved back down to the master bedroom. I got the big (read: queen) bed this time and Olivia sleeps in the twin.
Our bedtime routine has evolved over the years, as it does.
Back before cancer and chemo and all that brought with it, we’d settle on the couch and I’d scratch Olivia’s back/legs/arms (whatever was itchy) until she fell asleep. Some nights it was so frustrating because she’d wiggle, turn, twist, etc. But once she was asleep, I could either carry her to bed or wake her just enough to get her to walk up the stairs and climb into bed herself, going right back to sleep.
Cancer and the exhaustion of treatment put an end to that. After my surgery, I couldn’t sit on the couch with her for an hour and scratch her. At that point, we started just going to upstairs, wide awake, and going to bed that way.
That brought its own struggles, though.
In the past few months, our bedtime routine has been:
Brush teeth, go upstairs, the turtles and bug (stuffed, obviously) kiss her goodnight. I scratch her back for all of ten seconds. I kiss her goodnight. I tell her I have to go take care of things in the bathroom.
I come back ten (or so) minutes later. She’s playing with her book light.
The turtles (Travis, mostly) ask her questions, she gives actual answers. Barbie (a Lego Barbie, just the head and torso) sings Frere Jacques and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. She does this while ‘standing’ on a cube that lights up. She really belts it out on that cube, just saying.
Then Barbie kissed Olivia, Travis, Rosie, Gub and Rupert (all the stuffed turtles/lady bug.)
Then I kiss her goodnight again and scratch her back for another ten seconds and go to my bed.
There she asks me questions for at least a half hour. Sigh.
Finally, I tell her it’s time to try and sleep. She might or might not ask a few more questions. Then we go to sleep.
Sure, it’s exhausting but we sleep through the night, so I’m calling it a win.
Last night, though. The night she took her third pill, I tucked her in. The turtles and Gub kissed her good night. I told her I had to go brush my teeth and gather the next day’s clothes and suggested, gently, that maybe she should just try and sleep while I was doing that.
When I came back, maybe 15 minutes later, she was sound asleep.
Obviously, I don’t know if this sleep change is a one-time event, if it was caused by her still being sort of sick or if it’s a sign of the Lexapro working to settle her brain down. I guess we’ll see.
Monday, December 2, 2019
That One Monday When I Was Cranky
One Monday night as we were heading to bed, Olivia asked me AGAIN, why I was always so tired and cranky.
First…it was a Monday.
Second, she asked me this at 9:30pm. I’d been awake since 5:30.
But to give a rundown of all the things that cumulated to make me cranky that night here’s the list:
I got home twenty minutes later than usual because I had to stop at Walmart before going home to buy packing tape. Do I use packing tape? No. I do not. But hell, since I am in town every single fucking day of the week, (you know, since I GO TO WORK) it’s no big deal to run into Walmart, is it? It’s way more convenient for me to do so than for the person who actually uses the damn tape to make a special trip to town to buy the tape. I mean, he never has to leave the house but we wouldn’t want to put him out and make him GO TO TOWN to purchase the items that help his business thrive. No, he has an assistant for that, right?
Ahem.
So, I walked in the door at 5:20. I’m informed that one of my children is on the toilet pooping. I’ll let you, dear reader, figure out which one. I mean, one of them wants help after she poops and one of them would rather die than require help from her mother after she moves her bowels. Again, I’ll let you decide which is which.
I leave the tape on the table, put the cash that was requested with the purchase of the tape on the counter. I look through Olivia’s folder and find her homework packet.
The pooping child announces, “I’m dooooone!” as I’m heading down the basement stairs. I suggest none-too-gently that perhaps she should wipe herself since I was BUSY.
Tom declared he was doing the dishes and couldn’t assist in the butt wiping.
The other child in the household said she was too busy doing her ab workout and couldn’t help either.
I transferred the clean, dry sheets from the drier to a basket. I put the clean, wet towels in the drier. I started the drier.
I paused and started watching HULU on my phone, a moment of peace in a world of chaos.
I finally headed back upstairs.
Guess who is STILL sitting on the toilet, waiting for someone, ANYONE other than herself to come and attend to her butt.
I stalked into the bathroom, told her to GET UP from the toilet. I gave her a wet wipe and told her to wipe her butt. She did and then she tried to hand me the used wipe! I told her to throw it away!
You guys.
I am so tired of dealing with anyone but my own bathroom issues I can’t even tell you.
I KNOW we’re lucky. I KNOW she’s doing great. I KNOW THIS. But I’m tired of it. SO TIRED.
Finally, we sat down to do homework. Sigh.
Through all this, there are sounds being made by several people in our house, (all of them except me) about us going to my mom’s house that evening.
I didn’t want to. I was tired. I just wanted to be home.
When homework was finally done at 6:05, I called my mom to let her know that we were JUST finishing up and she shouldn’t expect us.
She said that if we were hungry, we could come on over because she had food ready.
Fine.
At least I hadn’t taken my shoes off.
We drove to my mom’s. We ate. Olivia told stories and Alyssa amused my mom and Lloyd with her antics.
We got home at 7:15.
I went up to see if I needed to change the sheets on anyone’s bed. What does that entail? It requires me to SNIFF the sheets to see if they’re stinky. Yes. Let that sink in. I have to SMELL the sheets to see if they smell like urine.
It’s as gross as it sounds.
And she wonders why I’m cranky.
For what it’s worth, on this night, those sheets were not stinky. I repeat, NOT STINKY. So no beds needed to be stripped and remade. A small spark of joy in an otherwise long drudge of a night.
I just…I don’t even know. I don’t hate my life. Really I don’t. I know how good I’ve got it, relatively speaking.
I do realize that I don’t do more than any other mother and/or wife out there. It’s just that at the end of the day, I would like to be done. I’m tired, just like every other overworked parent in this world.
I would like my family to know that I’m sorry for my crankiness, though. They don’t deserve that. When I get like that, I need to just go find a quiet corner of our house and settle myself down.
As we settled in that night, Olivia said in the dark to no one in particular (I was the only other person in the room but whatever), "At least Dad's not tired and cranky all the time."
Yeah. At least she can count on Dad.
First…it was a Monday.
Second, she asked me this at 9:30pm. I’d been awake since 5:30.
But to give a rundown of all the things that cumulated to make me cranky that night here’s the list:
I got home twenty minutes later than usual because I had to stop at Walmart before going home to buy packing tape. Do I use packing tape? No. I do not. But hell, since I am in town every single fucking day of the week, (you know, since I GO TO WORK) it’s no big deal to run into Walmart, is it? It’s way more convenient for me to do so than for the person who actually uses the damn tape to make a special trip to town to buy the tape. I mean, he never has to leave the house but we wouldn’t want to put him out and make him GO TO TOWN to purchase the items that help his business thrive. No, he has an assistant for that, right?
Ahem.
So, I walked in the door at 5:20. I’m informed that one of my children is on the toilet pooping. I’ll let you, dear reader, figure out which one. I mean, one of them wants help after she poops and one of them would rather die than require help from her mother after she moves her bowels. Again, I’ll let you decide which is which.
I leave the tape on the table, put the cash that was requested with the purchase of the tape on the counter. I look through Olivia’s folder and find her homework packet.
The pooping child announces, “I’m dooooone!” as I’m heading down the basement stairs. I suggest none-too-gently that perhaps she should wipe herself since I was BUSY.
Tom declared he was doing the dishes and couldn’t assist in the butt wiping.
The other child in the household said she was too busy doing her ab workout and couldn’t help either.
I transferred the clean, dry sheets from the drier to a basket. I put the clean, wet towels in the drier. I started the drier.
I paused and started watching HULU on my phone, a moment of peace in a world of chaos.
I finally headed back upstairs.
Guess who is STILL sitting on the toilet, waiting for someone, ANYONE other than herself to come and attend to her butt.
I stalked into the bathroom, told her to GET UP from the toilet. I gave her a wet wipe and told her to wipe her butt. She did and then she tried to hand me the used wipe! I told her to throw it away!
You guys.
I am so tired of dealing with anyone but my own bathroom issues I can’t even tell you.
I KNOW we’re lucky. I KNOW she’s doing great. I KNOW THIS. But I’m tired of it. SO TIRED.
Finally, we sat down to do homework. Sigh.
Through all this, there are sounds being made by several people in our house, (all of them except me) about us going to my mom’s house that evening.
I didn’t want to. I was tired. I just wanted to be home.
When homework was finally done at 6:05, I called my mom to let her know that we were JUST finishing up and she shouldn’t expect us.
She said that if we were hungry, we could come on over because she had food ready.
Fine.
At least I hadn’t taken my shoes off.
We drove to my mom’s. We ate. Olivia told stories and Alyssa amused my mom and Lloyd with her antics.
We got home at 7:15.
I went up to see if I needed to change the sheets on anyone’s bed. What does that entail? It requires me to SNIFF the sheets to see if they’re stinky. Yes. Let that sink in. I have to SMELL the sheets to see if they smell like urine.
It’s as gross as it sounds.
And she wonders why I’m cranky.
For what it’s worth, on this night, those sheets were not stinky. I repeat, NOT STINKY. So no beds needed to be stripped and remade. A small spark of joy in an otherwise long drudge of a night.
I just…I don’t even know. I don’t hate my life. Really I don’t. I know how good I’ve got it, relatively speaking.
I do realize that I don’t do more than any other mother and/or wife out there. It’s just that at the end of the day, I would like to be done. I’m tired, just like every other overworked parent in this world.
I would like my family to know that I’m sorry for my crankiness, though. They don’t deserve that. When I get like that, I need to just go find a quiet corner of our house and settle myself down.
As we settled in that night, Olivia said in the dark to no one in particular (I was the only other person in the room but whatever), "At least Dad's not tired and cranky all the time."
Yeah. At least she can count on Dad.
Wednesday, May 15, 2019
No...with a Side of PSTD
think I have post-traumatic stress syndrome left over from the twelve years of sleep deprivation I suffered at the hands of my wonderful, loving, adorable, EVIL children.
Why do I think this, you ask?
Let me tell you!!
First, background (because I can’t just jump into a story, I have to give background and make it that much longer, right? Right.) Mother’s day was lovely. Tom and the girls were very kind to me and I got some wonderful things and loving words. I slept in, Tom made breakfast, Alyssa got me a bamboo plant that I took to my desk at work. All great things.
Alas, laundry does not care that it was Mother’s day. Laundry sat in the basement in great piles and taunted me. It reminded me that I better not spent too much time at my mom’s celebrating HER because that laundry was not going to do itself.
So I did laundry all afternoon on Sunday, as it my curse. (Let me stop here and say that I don’t actually mind doing laundry. In all actuality, in this day and age, it kind of actually does do itself. One simply loads the washer and then the washer does the actual work. The dryer is the same. I don’t even mind folding and putting away all that laundry. I feel like it’s a labor of love for my family. Yes, seriously.)
Anyway! The laundry was taking FOREVER because I chose to also wash all the sheets that day.
Tom offered to ‘help.’ As in, he’d load and unload the machines but he’s not one for folding or putting away.
He also always overloads the washer which means it take two cycles in the dryer to finish a load. Ahem.
So…I ended up leaving only a load of towels unlaundered Sunday night.
When I got home from work in the Monday after Mother’s day, Tom had washed and dried the last load of towels.
He’d also done a bit of research on bedwetting. He’d done this FOR ME, don’t you know?
More backstory, I wet the bed until I was eight years old. My mom was so great about never making me feel bad about this. It was just something I couldn’t help doing.
Our house is a house of bedwetters. We can’t help it. One of us stopped at nine years old. The other…well, let’s remember that the freaking cards are stacked against her. Not only did she get the bedwetting gene from her mother but also probably from her father (not going there, not this time) but she also, unluck of the draw, was born with a syndrome that causes problems with potty training and all that entails.
I don’t mind washing sheets several times a week. I don’t mind that she sometimes needs a shower firs thing in the morning. She sleeps through it all and that means, YAY, I sleep through it too.
Have I ever mentioned that Alyssa, that darling girl whom I treasure with every cell in my body, didn’t sleep through the night until she was two years old?
I have? Oh, okay, well, there it again, written out for all to see.
And, just for the record, let’s remember that my sweet Olivia, light of my life, didn’t sleep through the night until she was EIGHT (8) YEARS old. Yes. YEARS. As in, she woke up every single night, at least twice, sometimes four or five times for more than TWO THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND TWENTY (2920) nights. That’s not even adding in leap years or that last month of nights from when she turned eight in late November and then, FINALLY, in December started sleeping through the night. Sit on that and ponder how I came out even semi-sane.
Ahem.
So.
That Monday afternoon, my better half had done some research on bedwetting and alarms one can purchase that will go off at the first sign of dampness.
He was thrilled to find that he could purchase one such alarm for the low, low price of $23.95.
Wouldn’t it be great, he thought, if the child who still wets the bed (for what it’s worth, she wears Pull-Ups and they don’t leak all that often) were to learn to wake up when she felt the need to pee?
Sure. It would be awesome if she did that. Not just for us but mostly for her. We want her to have that freedom, that sense of maturity and maybe even, someday, spend the night at a friend’s house without having to worry about the stress of Pull Ups and/or wetting the bed.
And yet…when he showed me the picture of the kid on the website wearing that alarm, I had to hold back tears.
Look at this picture:
Doesn't everyone feel panicky at the sight of that peaceful imp, just sleeping so soundly, alarm ready to BLAST him and the entire population in the tri-state area awake at the first hint of moisture?
The very thought of being woken up several times a night by a screeching alarm for, what weeks, or oh please dear Heaven, no, months?
I can’t go back to that.
We’ve been sleeping well for four years. But those four years haven’t erased the twelve years prior to that when I was woken up no fewer than two, most nights four times every single night for YEARS.
Is it selfish of me?
Probably.
Should I get over myself and do what’s best for my kid?
Obviously.
And I probably will but I had to put this out there, that sense of doom and depression that sets in at the thought of going back to being woken up over and over and over again each night for who knows how long.
I dread it. I feel panicky at the thought of it. It makes me sick to my stomach just considering the possibility of starting those nights of being pulled from a deep sleep, stumbling around, helping her to the bathroom, finding dry undies, resetting the alarm and then doing it again and again and again.
Tom could tell that I was not into his idea. (Yet another parenthetical: He always gets a little pissy when I don’t immediately embrace and applaud his ideas. He’s a little princess about that kind of thing…sigh.)
I tried to explain to him that he didn’t understand my panic because he wasn’t the one who got up with those two demons angels every night for years.
He offered to set up a cot in the family room and sleep down there with our darling until the alarm did its job and trained her brain to wake up when she needs to pee.
Ha. Hahaha.
Right.
He’s a funny, funny guy.
We all know who will be responding to that stupid alarm if we go that route. And it won’t be Not-The-Mama.
I’ll grin and bear it and I’ll come here and bitch and moan about it, because it’s what I do. But I can’t promise to be sane when this is all over. That, my dears, is simply asking too much.
Why do I think this, you ask?
Let me tell you!!
First, background (because I can’t just jump into a story, I have to give background and make it that much longer, right? Right.) Mother’s day was lovely. Tom and the girls were very kind to me and I got some wonderful things and loving words. I slept in, Tom made breakfast, Alyssa got me a bamboo plant that I took to my desk at work. All great things.
Alas, laundry does not care that it was Mother’s day. Laundry sat in the basement in great piles and taunted me. It reminded me that I better not spent too much time at my mom’s celebrating HER because that laundry was not going to do itself.
So I did laundry all afternoon on Sunday, as it my curse. (Let me stop here and say that I don’t actually mind doing laundry. In all actuality, in this day and age, it kind of actually does do itself. One simply loads the washer and then the washer does the actual work. The dryer is the same. I don’t even mind folding and putting away all that laundry. I feel like it’s a labor of love for my family. Yes, seriously.)
Anyway! The laundry was taking FOREVER because I chose to also wash all the sheets that day.
Tom offered to ‘help.’ As in, he’d load and unload the machines but he’s not one for folding or putting away.
He also always overloads the washer which means it take two cycles in the dryer to finish a load. Ahem.
So…I ended up leaving only a load of towels unlaundered Sunday night.
When I got home from work in the Monday after Mother’s day, Tom had washed and dried the last load of towels.
He’d also done a bit of research on bedwetting. He’d done this FOR ME, don’t you know?
More backstory, I wet the bed until I was eight years old. My mom was so great about never making me feel bad about this. It was just something I couldn’t help doing.
Our house is a house of bedwetters. We can’t help it. One of us stopped at nine years old. The other…well, let’s remember that the freaking cards are stacked against her. Not only did she get the bedwetting gene from her mother but also probably from her father (not going there, not this time) but she also, unluck of the draw, was born with a syndrome that causes problems with potty training and all that entails.
I don’t mind washing sheets several times a week. I don’t mind that she sometimes needs a shower firs thing in the morning. She sleeps through it all and that means, YAY, I sleep through it too.
Have I ever mentioned that Alyssa, that darling girl whom I treasure with every cell in my body, didn’t sleep through the night until she was two years old?
I have? Oh, okay, well, there it again, written out for all to see.
And, just for the record, let’s remember that my sweet Olivia, light of my life, didn’t sleep through the night until she was EIGHT (8) YEARS old. Yes. YEARS. As in, she woke up every single night, at least twice, sometimes four or five times for more than TWO THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND TWENTY (2920) nights. That’s not even adding in leap years or that last month of nights from when she turned eight in late November and then, FINALLY, in December started sleeping through the night. Sit on that and ponder how I came out even semi-sane.
Ahem.
So.
That Monday afternoon, my better half had done some research on bedwetting and alarms one can purchase that will go off at the first sign of dampness.
He was thrilled to find that he could purchase one such alarm for the low, low price of $23.95.
Wouldn’t it be great, he thought, if the child who still wets the bed (for what it’s worth, she wears Pull-Ups and they don’t leak all that often) were to learn to wake up when she felt the need to pee?
Sure. It would be awesome if she did that. Not just for us but mostly for her. We want her to have that freedom, that sense of maturity and maybe even, someday, spend the night at a friend’s house without having to worry about the stress of Pull Ups and/or wetting the bed.
And yet…when he showed me the picture of the kid on the website wearing that alarm, I had to hold back tears.
Look at this picture:
Doesn't everyone feel panicky at the sight of that peaceful imp, just sleeping so soundly, alarm ready to BLAST him and the entire population in the tri-state area awake at the first hint of moisture?
The very thought of being woken up several times a night by a screeching alarm for, what weeks, or oh please dear Heaven, no, months?
I can’t go back to that.
We’ve been sleeping well for four years. But those four years haven’t erased the twelve years prior to that when I was woken up no fewer than two, most nights four times every single night for YEARS.
Is it selfish of me?
Probably.
Should I get over myself and do what’s best for my kid?
Obviously.
And I probably will but I had to put this out there, that sense of doom and depression that sets in at the thought of going back to being woken up over and over and over again each night for who knows how long.
I dread it. I feel panicky at the thought of it. It makes me sick to my stomach just considering the possibility of starting those nights of being pulled from a deep sleep, stumbling around, helping her to the bathroom, finding dry undies, resetting the alarm and then doing it again and again and again.
Tom could tell that I was not into his idea. (Yet another parenthetical: He always gets a little pissy when I don’t immediately embrace and applaud his ideas. He’s a little princess about that kind of thing…sigh.)
I tried to explain to him that he didn’t understand my panic because he wasn’t the one who got up with those two demons angels every night for years.
He offered to set up a cot in the family room and sleep down there with our darling until the alarm did its job and trained her brain to wake up when she needs to pee.
Ha. Hahaha.
Right.
He’s a funny, funny guy.
We all know who will be responding to that stupid alarm if we go that route. And it won’t be Not-The-Mama.
I’ll grin and bear it and I’ll come here and bitch and moan about it, because it’s what I do. But I can’t promise to be sane when this is all over. That, my dears, is simply asking too much.
Friday, May 3, 2019
Powerful
My love is sleep is well documented.
Each time one of my kids (Alyssa) asks me who my favorite daughter is, I tell her, “Whichever one goes to sleep first.”
I have lamented the fact that neither of my children were good sleepers as baby ad nauseum. I think they were both out to kill me, quite honestly. Their lack of sleep definitely contributed to my current state of fatness. I mean, if they’d slept better as babies, I wouldn’t have had to self-medicate with Mountain Dew and Funyuns to stay awake during our horrific commute back in the day.
Of course, now that they both sleep wonderfully, I can’t actually blame them for my obesity. I need to take all the credit for that myself.
But finally, FINALLY, after all these years of wondering if either of my girls would become the lovers of sleep that I am, we have arrived.
Last Friday night, we all went to bed at the lovely hour of 10pm. I know, we’re a boring bunch, what can I say.
Alyssa woke me up the next morning at 6:30 to excitedly inform me that her track meet had been cancelled. She was so excited she didn’t know if she could go back to sleep, but she was sure going to try.
I was just REALLY relieved because I hadn’t been looking forward to sitting around in 42 degrees with rain falling on me. I’d planned my wardrobe accordingly and thought I was prepared but when the option to stay in bed where it was dry and warm presented itself, yes, I was so happy to not have to bundle up and still freeze.
Around 9am I heard shuffling from Liv’s bed. She rustled around a bit and then announced, “Wow. That was a powerful sleep.”
Ha! Oh sweetie, I totally feel you on that one. Sleep is such a powerful thing. It can restore you. It can heal you. It can take you on adventures and brighten your mood.
We all need more nights that lead to eleven hours of powerful sleep.
Each time one of my kids (Alyssa) asks me who my favorite daughter is, I tell her, “Whichever one goes to sleep first.”
I have lamented the fact that neither of my children were good sleepers as baby ad nauseum. I think they were both out to kill me, quite honestly. Their lack of sleep definitely contributed to my current state of fatness. I mean, if they’d slept better as babies, I wouldn’t have had to self-medicate with Mountain Dew and Funyuns to stay awake during our horrific commute back in the day.
Of course, now that they both sleep wonderfully, I can’t actually blame them for my obesity. I need to take all the credit for that myself.
But finally, FINALLY, after all these years of wondering if either of my girls would become the lovers of sleep that I am, we have arrived.
Last Friday night, we all went to bed at the lovely hour of 10pm. I know, we’re a boring bunch, what can I say.
Alyssa woke me up the next morning at 6:30 to excitedly inform me that her track meet had been cancelled. She was so excited she didn’t know if she could go back to sleep, but she was sure going to try.
I was just REALLY relieved because I hadn’t been looking forward to sitting around in 42 degrees with rain falling on me. I’d planned my wardrobe accordingly and thought I was prepared but when the option to stay in bed where it was dry and warm presented itself, yes, I was so happy to not have to bundle up and still freeze.
Around 9am I heard shuffling from Liv’s bed. She rustled around a bit and then announced, “Wow. That was a powerful sleep.”
Ha! Oh sweetie, I totally feel you on that one. Sleep is such a powerful thing. It can restore you. It can heal you. It can take you on adventures and brighten your mood.
We all need more nights that lead to eleven hours of powerful sleep.
Tuesday, April 30, 2019
"Unplugged"
Last Wednesday evening I was upstairs making Olivia’s bed while she soaked in the bath. I was watching The Act on Hulu through my phone.
Alyssa was in her bathroom, ‘grooming’ before her shower. She was watching YouTube.
Tom was…doing something downstairs. Probably packing something to be shipped the next day.
The show on my phone started buffering and then stopped completely. I closed the Hulu app, thinking I was just too far from the living room, which is where our router is. It sometimes does make a difference where you are in house for the WIFI to reach your device.
A few minutes later, Alyssa came in, all fresh from the shower.
“Are you in the WIFI?” she asked, wanting to know if I was hogging all the bandwidth.
“No,” I informed her. “My Hulu was being weird so I turned off my WIFI.”
She flounced down the stairs to see if Tom was on the computer, which, by its very proximity to the router and modem, is the first served by our WIFI.
He wasn’t.
Huh. Weird.
Later, Tom mentioned he thought he’d heard the router sizzle earlier that evening.
Whatever the case, we had no internet.
It was 7:45pm on a Wednesday.
Whatever were we going to do with ourselves without precious weefee!?!
I mean, sure, we have more DVDs than I care to count. We have antenna TV, we have books and board games.
But you’d have thought we were in the middle of a blackout without access to candles.
We did end up watching a rerun of The Goldbergs and the last half of Chicago Med and then the first ten minutes of the newest season of The Amazing Race (fucking Rupert from Survivor is on there, back in his stupid ass tie-dyed shirt, OMG!) and then were all in bed by 9:30, with lights out and eyes closed.
It was actually kind of amazing.
Of course, we expected to come home on Thursday to find that Tom has gotten everything fixed.
We were disappointed by that expectation. Though it was softened by spending almost two hours at my mom’s after school and work, soaking up her lovely WIFI.
When we got home, Tom announced that the new modem he’d purchased that day for $150 did not fix the problem. Our internet provider would be out sometime the next day, Friday, with a new router.
So we spent another evening without WIFI. Both Alyssa’s and my phone have access to data but it costs us. I was able to check emails for Tom and get addresses for his shipments but there would be no Hulu or Netflix.
We ended up watching The Hunger Games on DVD.
And we were in bed again by 9:30.
There’s something to be said for being unplugged, even if just a little.
But yes, I was incredibly glad when the WIFI was back in full force. I mean, come on, now that I’ve experienced Hulu…I don’t want to give it up.
Alyssa was in her bathroom, ‘grooming’ before her shower. She was watching YouTube.
Tom was…doing something downstairs. Probably packing something to be shipped the next day.
The show on my phone started buffering and then stopped completely. I closed the Hulu app, thinking I was just too far from the living room, which is where our router is. It sometimes does make a difference where you are in house for the WIFI to reach your device.
A few minutes later, Alyssa came in, all fresh from the shower.
“Are you in the WIFI?” she asked, wanting to know if I was hogging all the bandwidth.
“No,” I informed her. “My Hulu was being weird so I turned off my WIFI.”
She flounced down the stairs to see if Tom was on the computer, which, by its very proximity to the router and modem, is the first served by our WIFI.
He wasn’t.
Huh. Weird.
Later, Tom mentioned he thought he’d heard the router sizzle earlier that evening.
Whatever the case, we had no internet.
It was 7:45pm on a Wednesday.
Whatever were we going to do with ourselves without precious weefee!?!
I mean, sure, we have more DVDs than I care to count. We have antenna TV, we have books and board games.
But you’d have thought we were in the middle of a blackout without access to candles.
We did end up watching a rerun of The Goldbergs and the last half of Chicago Med and then the first ten minutes of the newest season of The Amazing Race (fucking Rupert from Survivor is on there, back in his stupid ass tie-dyed shirt, OMG!) and then were all in bed by 9:30, with lights out and eyes closed.
It was actually kind of amazing.
Of course, we expected to come home on Thursday to find that Tom has gotten everything fixed.
We were disappointed by that expectation. Though it was softened by spending almost two hours at my mom’s after school and work, soaking up her lovely WIFI.
When we got home, Tom announced that the new modem he’d purchased that day for $150 did not fix the problem. Our internet provider would be out sometime the next day, Friday, with a new router.
So we spent another evening without WIFI. Both Alyssa’s and my phone have access to data but it costs us. I was able to check emails for Tom and get addresses for his shipments but there would be no Hulu or Netflix.
We ended up watching The Hunger Games on DVD.
And we were in bed again by 9:30.
There’s something to be said for being unplugged, even if just a little.
But yes, I was incredibly glad when the WIFI was back in full force. I mean, come on, now that I’ve experienced Hulu…I don’t want to give it up.
Tuesday, April 23, 2019
Seeing Patterns
The last two Sunday nights have been crap when it comes to sleep. I toss and turn and ache and…maybe it’s too soon to declare a pattern, but I’m going to do it anyway.
I slept so great last week on Monday nights through Friday nights. No aches, no tossing and turning. I didn’t even have to get up to pee on those nights.
Sunday nights into Monday mornings, I have to get up at least twice. I have to switch positions more times than I can count because my hips hurt or my back hurts, or my stupid boobs hurt.
I know, tmi. It’s my blog, I’ll overshare if I want to.
(Damn it, now that stupid song is stuck in my head…it’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to, cry if I want to, cry if I want to. You’d cry too if happened to you, ooooh, oooooh, ooooh.) You’re welcome.
So what makes Sunday’s so hard on my old, fat body?
Laundry.
It’s got to be the laundry.
It can’t possibly be the fact that I sleep (or at least lay in bed, dozing) until 10:30. Nope, not that at all.
It’s the laundry.
Our washer and dryer are in the basement. The closets and dressers are on the second floor. Each flight of stairs is fourteen steps. Yes, Zane, fourteen. You have to count that last step, silly boy.
So, to take clean laundry from the basement to the bedrooms, I’m going up twenty eight stairs. I do that more times than I can count. But I only do that multiple times on Sundays. Oh, yes and I vacuum the living room and the family room. And I mop the kitchen. So…yes, I move more on Sundays than I do on every other day of the week combined.
I really should move more throughout the week so that I’m not so fatigued on Sunday nights. I need to build up my endurance so that I can sleep better on Sunday nights.
Or…I’ll start taking an Advil PM at around 7pm on Sunday evenings. That sounds way easier than actually exercising on a more regular basis.
I’m nothing if not extraordinarily lazy.
I slept so great last week on Monday nights through Friday nights. No aches, no tossing and turning. I didn’t even have to get up to pee on those nights.
Sunday nights into Monday mornings, I have to get up at least twice. I have to switch positions more times than I can count because my hips hurt or my back hurts, or my stupid boobs hurt.
I know, tmi. It’s my blog, I’ll overshare if I want to.
(Damn it, now that stupid song is stuck in my head…it’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to, cry if I want to, cry if I want to. You’d cry too if happened to you, ooooh, oooooh, ooooh.) You’re welcome.
So what makes Sunday’s so hard on my old, fat body?
Laundry.
It’s got to be the laundry.
It can’t possibly be the fact that I sleep (or at least lay in bed, dozing) until 10:30. Nope, not that at all.
It’s the laundry.
Our washer and dryer are in the basement. The closets and dressers are on the second floor. Each flight of stairs is fourteen steps. Yes, Zane, fourteen. You have to count that last step, silly boy.
So, to take clean laundry from the basement to the bedrooms, I’m going up twenty eight stairs. I do that more times than I can count. But I only do that multiple times on Sundays. Oh, yes and I vacuum the living room and the family room. And I mop the kitchen. So…yes, I move more on Sundays than I do on every other day of the week combined.
I really should move more throughout the week so that I’m not so fatigued on Sunday nights. I need to build up my endurance so that I can sleep better on Sunday nights.
Or…I’ll start taking an Advil PM at around 7pm on Sunday evenings. That sounds way easier than actually exercising on a more regular basis.
I’m nothing if not extraordinarily lazy.
Thursday, December 6, 2018
Just Like Old Times
Olivia finished antibiotics for an ear infection a couple of weeks ago.
Sunday night/Monday morning around 2am, I woke up to the sound of Alyssa’s voice. She was telling me that she couldn’t sleep.
She asked me if the medicine I’d given her that evening had caffeine.
Now, wait just a minute. Let me point out that when I gave her the generic Excedrin, it was noon. When she took more of it, of her own volition, I would like to point out, it was about 8:30pm. So, while yes, technically, the medicine I gave her did have caffeine but when I gave it to her, it wouldn’t have affected her sleep. When SHE took it again, all by herself, because, let’s remember this ‘child’ is about six weeks out from turning SIXTEEN YEARS OLD, yes, it was going to affect her sleep.
Whew, enough backstory? Okay, then.
So it was 2am and she knew that 6:45 was coming fast and she was stressed because she couldn’t sleep. She told me there in the dark of my room that she’d even cried a little because she was so tired but couldn’t sleep.
I rubbed her hair as she talked and told her that taking a PM medicine probably wasn’t a good idea because at 2am, it wouldn’t have time to wear off by the time it was time to go to school and she’d be groggy. Then I skootched over and suggested she lay down with me for a bit. She was asleep in five minutes.
And this, my friends, is how a family ends up co-sleeping well into the teen years. Because Mom is freaking tired and the kids wake her up and she’ll do anything, ANYTHING, to just go back to sleep, even inviting her teenager to sleep in her bed just so everyone can go back to sleep.
She stayed there for about an hour and a half before heading back to her own bed and sleeping until her alarm went off. She woke feeling remarkably refreshed and got through the day.
When we all got home on Monday evening, though, she said that her throat still hurt. She’d taken the generic Excedrin because of a sore throat. (I know…)
Tuesday morning, after a good night’s sleep, it was decided that her sore throat isn’t getting better and so Tom will be bringing her to town and I’d meet them at Urgent Care after school/work.
Yes, winter has arrived and with it the germs and lowered immunities that we all dread. Wheee!
Sunday night/Monday morning around 2am, I woke up to the sound of Alyssa’s voice. She was telling me that she couldn’t sleep.
She asked me if the medicine I’d given her that evening had caffeine.
Now, wait just a minute. Let me point out that when I gave her the generic Excedrin, it was noon. When she took more of it, of her own volition, I would like to point out, it was about 8:30pm. So, while yes, technically, the medicine I gave her did have caffeine but when I gave it to her, it wouldn’t have affected her sleep. When SHE took it again, all by herself, because, let’s remember this ‘child’ is about six weeks out from turning SIXTEEN YEARS OLD, yes, it was going to affect her sleep.
Whew, enough backstory? Okay, then.
So it was 2am and she knew that 6:45 was coming fast and she was stressed because she couldn’t sleep. She told me there in the dark of my room that she’d even cried a little because she was so tired but couldn’t sleep.
I rubbed her hair as she talked and told her that taking a PM medicine probably wasn’t a good idea because at 2am, it wouldn’t have time to wear off by the time it was time to go to school and she’d be groggy. Then I skootched over and suggested she lay down with me for a bit. She was asleep in five minutes.
And this, my friends, is how a family ends up co-sleeping well into the teen years. Because Mom is freaking tired and the kids wake her up and she’ll do anything, ANYTHING, to just go back to sleep, even inviting her teenager to sleep in her bed just so everyone can go back to sleep.
She stayed there for about an hour and a half before heading back to her own bed and sleeping until her alarm went off. She woke feeling remarkably refreshed and got through the day.
When we all got home on Monday evening, though, she said that her throat still hurt. She’d taken the generic Excedrin because of a sore throat. (I know…)
Tuesday morning, after a good night’s sleep, it was decided that her sore throat isn’t getting better and so Tom will be bringing her to town and I’d meet them at Urgent Care after school/work.
Yes, winter has arrived and with it the germs and lowered immunities that we all dread. Wheee!
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Tired
One would think that my eight months off work would have caught me up on the sleep deprivation I suffered while the girls were little and I was commuting.
One would be wrong.
I’m still tired. All the time.
We went to West Lafayette last weekend for the PUDM. It was fun. But the beds in the hotel where we stayed were awful. I slept so badly I may as well have not slept.
Olivia slept great but she’s twelve, twelve year olds can sleep on a pile of rocks and be comfy.
People my age? Not so much. The rocks would need to be covered with a mattress and the mattress would need to be covered with a topper, then I’d need a high thread count sheet to cover the mattress topper. Then, if you please, let’s add the flat sheet because I’m old school like that, a couple of quilts and a comforter that I can kick off when I wake up in the dead of night covered in gross sweat. And that’s IF everything above has been provided and I am asleep on the bed of rocks alone. Add another person and we’re in big trouble and there will probably be no sleep.
I’m ready for this month to be over. I hate wishing the time away but we’ve been so busy, always running, always cramming stuff in.
No wonder Olivia is sick.
This week we are getting our flu shots on Thursday, I’m taking food to play practice, you guessed it, Thursday. The performances are Friday and Saturday.
Next weekend is Thanksgiving. I’m currently thankful that we don’t have to travel to family for dinner. Though, let’s remember that even though we only drive three miles to my mom’s each holiday, I still managed to hit a deer last Thanksgiving. And I don’t think the deer was killed, she got up and ran away while we sat there in my car, which suffered over $8000 worth of damage. Sigh.
But that’s all in the past, where we definitely want to leave 2017. It was a tough year and I’m glad to have survived it. 2018 has been better than 2017 but I am hoping and praying that 2019 will be better still. I suppose I could take the attitude that it will be what I make it. I would like to think I have the power to shape my own destiny.
The problem is, I don’t seem to have the power to shape my own bedtime, let alone my own destiny.
One would be wrong.
I’m still tired. All the time.
We went to West Lafayette last weekend for the PUDM. It was fun. But the beds in the hotel where we stayed were awful. I slept so badly I may as well have not slept.
Olivia slept great but she’s twelve, twelve year olds can sleep on a pile of rocks and be comfy.
People my age? Not so much. The rocks would need to be covered with a mattress and the mattress would need to be covered with a topper, then I’d need a high thread count sheet to cover the mattress topper. Then, if you please, let’s add the flat sheet because I’m old school like that, a couple of quilts and a comforter that I can kick off when I wake up in the dead of night covered in gross sweat. And that’s IF everything above has been provided and I am asleep on the bed of rocks alone. Add another person and we’re in big trouble and there will probably be no sleep.
I’m ready for this month to be over. I hate wishing the time away but we’ve been so busy, always running, always cramming stuff in.
No wonder Olivia is sick.
This week we are getting our flu shots on Thursday, I’m taking food to play practice, you guessed it, Thursday. The performances are Friday and Saturday.
Next weekend is Thanksgiving. I’m currently thankful that we don’t have to travel to family for dinner. Though, let’s remember that even though we only drive three miles to my mom’s each holiday, I still managed to hit a deer last Thanksgiving. And I don’t think the deer was killed, she got up and ran away while we sat there in my car, which suffered over $8000 worth of damage. Sigh.
But that’s all in the past, where we definitely want to leave 2017. It was a tough year and I’m glad to have survived it. 2018 has been better than 2017 but I am hoping and praying that 2019 will be better still. I suppose I could take the attitude that it will be what I make it. I would like to think I have the power to shape my own destiny.
The problem is, I don’t seem to have the power to shape my own bedtime, let alone my own destiny.
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
Bed-Sharing
Anyone who has read my blog for any amount of time knows that we’re a family of co-sleepers. Alyssa slept in our bed from the first day she came home from the hospital. She might have spent two nights in her crib before we took it down and put it away until Olivia came home.
Olivia slept in a bassinet for the first couple of months because she was on an heart monitor at first and it was dangerous for her to be in the family bed. But once she was off the monitor, she was in our bed too.
When we moved to Ohio from Indiana, the master bedroom was so big, that I just put our queen sized bed in there along with a couple of smaller beds. Seriously, it was still not crowded.
In the end, Tom tended to fall asleep on the couch, I put the girls to bed in the queen bed and I slept on a twin bed in the same room with them. That was the case for the first several years in our current house.
So I got used to not sleeping with anyone and it is glorious.
A few years ago, we decided it was time for the girls to sleep in their own room. So, because I’m a hoverer, we all three moved from the master bedroom to the larger of the three other bedrooms. The girls were in bunk beds, Alyssa on top, Olivia on bottom. I was in a full bed. That lasted until Alyssa’s fourteenth birthday (so going on two years ago.) At that point, she kicked me and Olivia out.
Alyssa now sleeps in her own room. See, it happens, eventually, to everyone. . Just saying to everyone who thought it was insane that we were sleeping in the same bed/room forever. Everyone should do what works for them. I’m not judging anyone who chooses to put their baby in their own crib in their own room from the start. If that works for you, go you. It didn’t work for me. But I know it works for most people. So yes, stepping off my non-judgmental soapbox now.
Where was I?
Oh yes, Alyssa sleeps in her own room. We need to take the bunkbeds down now that she’s sleeping in the full bed in her room. It would give her ever so much more room…one of these days. For sure.
When Lyss kicked us out, Olivia and I moved back down the hall to the master bedroom. But we didn’t go back to sharing a bad. Oh hell no. She sleeps in a twin bed and I’m in the queen. Tom is still on the couch, for anyone interested. He always falls asleep there watching tv and I figure I get two of us to bed I don’t want to be responsible for making him get up and come to bed too.
All this (almost 500 words, good lord!) to say that Olivia and I shared a bed last weekend at the hotel in Bloomington and it…was…awful.
That child has no concept of personal space. The first night, I put a blanket between us. It helped not at all. I pushed her leg off me no fewer than five times. She weighs about 105lbs and still took up more than 2/3 of the bed. Please just believe me when I say that I weight more than she does. I hugged the edge of the bed all night long both nights.
The second night, I woke myself up whimpering, “No, no, no, no.”
I’d been dreaming that Olivia had her head in my back and was pushing at me. It turns out it was her knee. Apparently, she wanted more than her 2/3 of the bed. She wanted the whole thing and was trying, in her sleep, to kicked me out. I had to push back at her knee really hard just to get her to give me three extra inches of bed.
The next morning when my mom got up to get dressed, I limped across the room and laid down in her vacant bed.
Ten minutes after I’d vacated the ten inches of bed that Olivia has allotted me, she woke up and asked me what I was doing.
I replied, “Escaping the torture.”
“Can I join you?” she asked sleepily.
I managed a laugh even though every joint in my body ached. “No, you’re the one who was torturing me.”
Alas, I wish I could say that I will never share a bed with that child again but I think when we spend the night in West Lafayette this Saturday I’ll have to brave it all again. I will try the blanket thing again, though. While the blanket was there, she didn’t jam her knee into my ribs so that’s something.
Olivia slept in a bassinet for the first couple of months because she was on an heart monitor at first and it was dangerous for her to be in the family bed. But once she was off the monitor, she was in our bed too.
When we moved to Ohio from Indiana, the master bedroom was so big, that I just put our queen sized bed in there along with a couple of smaller beds. Seriously, it was still not crowded.
In the end, Tom tended to fall asleep on the couch, I put the girls to bed in the queen bed and I slept on a twin bed in the same room with them. That was the case for the first several years in our current house.
So I got used to not sleeping with anyone and it is glorious.
A few years ago, we decided it was time for the girls to sleep in their own room. So, because I’m a hoverer, we all three moved from the master bedroom to the larger of the three other bedrooms. The girls were in bunk beds, Alyssa on top, Olivia on bottom. I was in a full bed. That lasted until Alyssa’s fourteenth birthday (so going on two years ago.) At that point, she kicked me and Olivia out.
Alyssa now sleeps in her own room. See, it happens, eventually, to everyone. . Just saying to everyone who thought it was insane that we were sleeping in the same bed/room forever. Everyone should do what works for them. I’m not judging anyone who chooses to put their baby in their own crib in their own room from the start. If that works for you, go you. It didn’t work for me. But I know it works for most people. So yes, stepping off my non-judgmental soapbox now.
Where was I?
Oh yes, Alyssa sleeps in her own room. We need to take the bunkbeds down now that she’s sleeping in the full bed in her room. It would give her ever so much more room…one of these days. For sure.
When Lyss kicked us out, Olivia and I moved back down the hall to the master bedroom. But we didn’t go back to sharing a bad. Oh hell no. She sleeps in a twin bed and I’m in the queen. Tom is still on the couch, for anyone interested. He always falls asleep there watching tv and I figure I get two of us to bed I don’t want to be responsible for making him get up and come to bed too.
All this (almost 500 words, good lord!) to say that Olivia and I shared a bed last weekend at the hotel in Bloomington and it…was…awful.
That child has no concept of personal space. The first night, I put a blanket between us. It helped not at all. I pushed her leg off me no fewer than five times. She weighs about 105lbs and still took up more than 2/3 of the bed. Please just believe me when I say that I weight more than she does. I hugged the edge of the bed all night long both nights.
The second night, I woke myself up whimpering, “No, no, no, no.”
I’d been dreaming that Olivia had her head in my back and was pushing at me. It turns out it was her knee. Apparently, she wanted more than her 2/3 of the bed. She wanted the whole thing and was trying, in her sleep, to kicked me out. I had to push back at her knee really hard just to get her to give me three extra inches of bed.
The next morning when my mom got up to get dressed, I limped across the room and laid down in her vacant bed.
Ten minutes after I’d vacated the ten inches of bed that Olivia has allotted me, she woke up and asked me what I was doing.
I replied, “Escaping the torture.”
“Can I join you?” she asked sleepily.
I managed a laugh even though every joint in my body ached. “No, you’re the one who was torturing me.”
Alas, I wish I could say that I will never share a bed with that child again but I think when we spend the night in West Lafayette this Saturday I’ll have to brave it all again. I will try the blanket thing again, though. While the blanket was there, she didn’t jam her knee into my ribs so that’s something.
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
A Normal Kid
As I tucked Olivia into bed the other night, I watched her as she arranged her menagerie of comfort items and I wondered aloud, “Why can’t you be a normal kid and sleep with stuffed animals?”
She laughed (thank goodness) and looked down at her grouping.
Let me help you out here. Among the things she sleeps with each night were: a book light, sometimes illuminated, sometimes not, a turtle nightlight, a pen shaped like a mermaid tail, the cap to a shampoo bottle, and a ball with a mermaid floating around in some sort of liquid inside it.
Yeah. Those are the things she takes to bed with her each night. She sometimes even wakes up in the middle of the night, calling out to me that she can’t find one of those things. I usually tell her we’ll find it in the morning (it’s almost always between the wall and the mattress or on the floor having fallen between the wall and the mattress.) I also tell her to go back to sleep.
All of the things she takes to bed for comfort are basically a kidney puncture waiting to happen. I don’t know how she can sleep with those things strewn about her bed, rolling onto them in her sleep, having them leave weird indentations on her skin by morning.
But honestly, I felt bad for the ‘normal kid’ comment. I mean, I’m sure lots of ‘normies’ sleep with weird things. And I know a lot of kids with her syndrome love stuffed animals.
My kid, however, thinks stuffed animals are creepy and would rather sleep with a backscratcher that’s shaped like a rake (you can get one of your very own at Rural King, they come in lots of different colors!) For the record, this post is NOT sponsored by Rural King. I’m pretty sure Rural King does not sponsor blogs. And let’s be clear here, this blog isn’t sponsored by anything but my own desire to overshare.
Anyway, all that to say that for the next several days, Olivia would suddenly chuckle and mutter, “A normal kid.”
I’m glad she finds the idea of ‘normal’ to be amusing. I’m glad she realized I wasn’t actually calling her abnormal.
We’re a family of weirdos, we all embrace our weirdness and we celebrate our differences. Alyssa has approximately three thousand seven hundred fourteen stuffed animals. I think she’s cornered the market on that part of ‘normal’ for this family.
I just wish Liv would pick things to sleep with that aren’t an actual danger to her health, you know, like the cup she once snuggled with when she was about three. That wouldn’t be nearly as bad as the rake or the mermaid pen.
Alas, she’s very much her own person and she’s decided those things bring her comfort in the dark of night.
Who am I to cause her stress by taking away her comfort items? Okay, I know I’m her mom and I should keep her safe so yeah, the rake backscratcher has to go, but the mermaid ball? I think that one’s unlikely to hurt her. And if these things help her sleep through the night? Everyone knows I’m all for that.
She laughed (thank goodness) and looked down at her grouping.
Let me help you out here. Among the things she sleeps with each night were: a book light, sometimes illuminated, sometimes not, a turtle nightlight, a pen shaped like a mermaid tail, the cap to a shampoo bottle, and a ball with a mermaid floating around in some sort of liquid inside it.
Yeah. Those are the things she takes to bed with her each night. She sometimes even wakes up in the middle of the night, calling out to me that she can’t find one of those things. I usually tell her we’ll find it in the morning (it’s almost always between the wall and the mattress or on the floor having fallen between the wall and the mattress.) I also tell her to go back to sleep.
All of the things she takes to bed for comfort are basically a kidney puncture waiting to happen. I don’t know how she can sleep with those things strewn about her bed, rolling onto them in her sleep, having them leave weird indentations on her skin by morning.
But honestly, I felt bad for the ‘normal kid’ comment. I mean, I’m sure lots of ‘normies’ sleep with weird things. And I know a lot of kids with her syndrome love stuffed animals.
My kid, however, thinks stuffed animals are creepy and would rather sleep with a backscratcher that’s shaped like a rake (you can get one of your very own at Rural King, they come in lots of different colors!) For the record, this post is NOT sponsored by Rural King. I’m pretty sure Rural King does not sponsor blogs. And let’s be clear here, this blog isn’t sponsored by anything but my own desire to overshare.
Anyway, all that to say that for the next several days, Olivia would suddenly chuckle and mutter, “A normal kid.”
I’m glad she finds the idea of ‘normal’ to be amusing. I’m glad she realized I wasn’t actually calling her abnormal.
We’re a family of weirdos, we all embrace our weirdness and we celebrate our differences. Alyssa has approximately three thousand seven hundred fourteen stuffed animals. I think she’s cornered the market on that part of ‘normal’ for this family.
I just wish Liv would pick things to sleep with that aren’t an actual danger to her health, you know, like the cup she once snuggled with when she was about three. That wouldn’t be nearly as bad as the rake or the mermaid pen.
Alas, she’s very much her own person and she’s decided those things bring her comfort in the dark of night.
Who am I to cause her stress by taking away her comfort items? Okay, I know I’m her mom and I should keep her safe so yeah, the rake backscratcher has to go, but the mermaid ball? I think that one’s unlikely to hurt her. And if these things help her sleep through the night? Everyone knows I’m all for that.
Sunday, September 23, 2018
An Experiment
Monday afternoon I was so tired that I announced my entire family that I was going to bed at 8:30. Olivia declared she was then too because no one else in the family knows how to get her ready for bed like I do.
Whatever, as long as she didn’t fight the early bedtime, I didn’t care if she went with me or waited until 9:00. Okay, honestly, I knew it would be easier for everyone, including me, if she just went to bed when I did.
So yes, we headed to bed at 8:30 on Monday.
Bedtime is Liv’s time to decompress, to talk about her day to me, to get whatever is in her sweet head out. She usually talks to me for at least a half hour after we’ve turned off the lights.
This means if we go to bed at 8:30, she’ll usually fall asleep between 9:00 and 9:30, which honestly, for a kid her age, isn’t that bad, maybe even a little late.
That first night was so lovely that we’ve gone to bed every single day this week at 8:30, 8:45 at the latest.
Thursday night she talked to me until 10:00, so I’m thinking three nights of early bedtime caught her up on any sleep deprivation she might have suffered. But that’s okay. It’s great even. We’re going to continue this habit of going to be earlier because I certainly feel better and I know she must too.
Of course, the teenager is still keeping teenage hours. I got up at 12:30 one night/morning to pee and take some Excedrin and I saw the light on under her door. I could hear her on her phone too. The next day I made the gentle suggestion that even though she’s not twelve, she still needs more sleep than your average bear and maybe 12:30am was not the best time to go to sleep.
She acknowledged that maybe that was a little late and promised to try and get to sleep earlier going forward.
We’ll see. Since she gets herself up each morning, I don’t have to deal with the crankiness that comes from only six hours of sleep on a consistent basis but there are other ways to discover if she’s getting enough. That’s all she needs to know.
Whatever, as long as she didn’t fight the early bedtime, I didn’t care if she went with me or waited until 9:00. Okay, honestly, I knew it would be easier for everyone, including me, if she just went to bed when I did.
So yes, we headed to bed at 8:30 on Monday.
Bedtime is Liv’s time to decompress, to talk about her day to me, to get whatever is in her sweet head out. She usually talks to me for at least a half hour after we’ve turned off the lights.
This means if we go to bed at 8:30, she’ll usually fall asleep between 9:00 and 9:30, which honestly, for a kid her age, isn’t that bad, maybe even a little late.
That first night was so lovely that we’ve gone to bed every single day this week at 8:30, 8:45 at the latest.
Thursday night she talked to me until 10:00, so I’m thinking three nights of early bedtime caught her up on any sleep deprivation she might have suffered. But that’s okay. It’s great even. We’re going to continue this habit of going to be earlier because I certainly feel better and I know she must too.
Of course, the teenager is still keeping teenage hours. I got up at 12:30 one night/morning to pee and take some Excedrin and I saw the light on under her door. I could hear her on her phone too. The next day I made the gentle suggestion that even though she’s not twelve, she still needs more sleep than your average bear and maybe 12:30am was not the best time to go to sleep.
She acknowledged that maybe that was a little late and promised to try and get to sleep earlier going forward.
We’ll see. Since she gets herself up each morning, I don’t have to deal with the crankiness that comes from only six hours of sleep on a consistent basis but there are other ways to discover if she’s getting enough. That’s all she needs to know.
Friday, March 23, 2018
Sleep - It's Me This Time
Sleep can be so difficult. There are moments when I'm sitting in the recliner, surrounded by my family, enjoying a television show and I can't keep my eyes open. Sleep descends upon me like a warm blanket that I can't resist.
Then, the very next night, I will be lying in bed, bundled under five blankets, unable to get warm, rolled into a ball of misery and I'm trying to wrestle with sleep, to grab it and force myself into slumber. Obviously, that doesn't work.
I like the quote from The Fault In Our Stars when Hazel compares falling in love with Augustus to falling asleep. "It happens slowly then all at once."
Olivia insists she doesn't know how to sleep. That child hasn't had a nap since she was two years old. Even during her bout with the flu a couple of weeks ago, she never napped.
The other night, she was awake until midnight. I kept telling her to go to sleep. She kept saying, "I don't know how." I would tell her to just close her eyes. She's reply, "But even with my eyes closed, I can still hear things."
I mean, sure, that's true, but sleep won't come if you don't close your eyes.
Or will it? Sleep happens even when people are trying to keep their eyes open so...there goes that rationale.
Anyway, this chemo thing/not working thing has screwed up my sleep schedule. I usually don't fall asleep until at least 1am. Then, on school days, I get up at 6:15 to get the girls up. I usually go back to bed at 7:30 once they are one the bus and sleep until at least 10:30. Yeah, I'm a mess. My whole days are spent recovering from not getting enough nighttime sleep and then I can't sleep at night all over again.
Boohoohooo.
Then, the very next night, I will be lying in bed, bundled under five blankets, unable to get warm, rolled into a ball of misery and I'm trying to wrestle with sleep, to grab it and force myself into slumber. Obviously, that doesn't work.
I like the quote from The Fault In Our Stars when Hazel compares falling in love with Augustus to falling asleep. "It happens slowly then all at once."
Olivia insists she doesn't know how to sleep. That child hasn't had a nap since she was two years old. Even during her bout with the flu a couple of weeks ago, she never napped.
The other night, she was awake until midnight. I kept telling her to go to sleep. She kept saying, "I don't know how." I would tell her to just close her eyes. She's reply, "But even with my eyes closed, I can still hear things."
I mean, sure, that's true, but sleep won't come if you don't close your eyes.
Or will it? Sleep happens even when people are trying to keep their eyes open so...there goes that rationale.
Anyway, this chemo thing/not working thing has screwed up my sleep schedule. I usually don't fall asleep until at least 1am. Then, on school days, I get up at 6:15 to get the girls up. I usually go back to bed at 7:30 once they are one the bus and sleep until at least 10:30. Yeah, I'm a mess. My whole days are spent recovering from not getting enough nighttime sleep and then I can't sleep at night all over again.
Boohoohooo.
Thursday, May 25, 2017
Up and At 'Em
Each day this week I’ve had to practically drag Olivia out of bed to get ready for school. I get up between 5:30 and 6:00, depending on the day. I try to wake Liv up around 6:15 to give her time to just relax before starting in on getting dressed, doing hair, eating breakfast. She needs about ten minutes to just sit in front of the space heater (in LATE MAY!) and cook her feet before she’s really able to function enough to, oh, put on underwear.
This morning, though, was different. My alarm went off at 5:30. I turned it off and rolled over, knowing the next alarm would go off at 5:45 (what?) At 5:32, Olivia called from her bed, “Mom?”
I muttered, “What?”
She asked me something I don’t even remember and I gave some answer and told her to go back to sleep, it wasn’t time to get up yet.
About thirty seconds after the second alarm went off (WHAT?!) she started to tell me about a dream she’d had. I didn’t listen because I went back to sleep.
Because I wasn’t listening, she called, “Mom!?”
I called back, “What! Don’t you know it’s time to be sleeping not chatting?”
She laughed and continued to chat as if we were in the middle of a conversation.
This kid. One regular school days, I have to literally drag her out of bed.
But on the last day of school, she can’t wait to start the day.
I suppose I understand. Kind of. Okay, not at all. She still had to go to school even if it was the last time for third grade. Who doesn’t want to snatch even five extra minutes of sleep?
Oh yeah, Olivia…that’s who doesn’t want to snatch a few extra minutes of sleep. Crazy girl.
This morning, though, was different. My alarm went off at 5:30. I turned it off and rolled over, knowing the next alarm would go off at 5:45 (what?) At 5:32, Olivia called from her bed, “Mom?”
I muttered, “What?”
She asked me something I don’t even remember and I gave some answer and told her to go back to sleep, it wasn’t time to get up yet.
About thirty seconds after the second alarm went off (WHAT?!) she started to tell me about a dream she’d had. I didn’t listen because I went back to sleep.
Because I wasn’t listening, she called, “Mom!?”
I called back, “What! Don’t you know it’s time to be sleeping not chatting?”
She laughed and continued to chat as if we were in the middle of a conversation.
This kid. One regular school days, I have to literally drag her out of bed.
But on the last day of school, she can’t wait to start the day.
I suppose I understand. Kind of. Okay, not at all. She still had to go to school even if it was the last time for third grade. Who doesn’t want to snatch even five extra minutes of sleep?
Oh yeah, Olivia…that’s who doesn’t want to snatch a few extra minutes of sleep. Crazy girl.
Wednesday, April 26, 2017
All Night Long
Sunday and Monday nights (or was it Monday and Tuesday mornings?) Olivia woke me up at 3am to discuss the weather, politics, the new animation of Monster High and whether or not she should change her earrings when the sun finally rises…) These wake ups both lasted nearly forty-five minutes, with me telling her after every single question to turn off the damned book light and go back to sleep.
Last night before bed, I told her that if she woke up in the middle of the night, she should roll over and go back to sleep and NOT talk to me…at all.
And what do you know? It worked. If she woke up, she didn’t tell me about it and I got a lovely night’s sleep last night. I don’t know if she did or not but that’s okay because I did. And supposedly a happy mom means the whole house is happy.
So…yeah, everybody’s happy, right?
Last night before bed, I told her that if she woke up in the middle of the night, she should roll over and go back to sleep and NOT talk to me…at all.
And what do you know? It worked. If she woke up, she didn’t tell me about it and I got a lovely night’s sleep last night. I don’t know if she did or not but that’s okay because I did. And supposedly a happy mom means the whole house is happy.
So…yeah, everybody’s happy, right?
Monday, April 24, 2017
Starring in My Own Personal Episode of The Super Nanny
Remember that show? It basically trained adults on how to parent and helped them get their kids under control.
While most of the kids in the episodes of Super Nanny were under five, I got to spend about an hour in a special kind of hell that only a belligerent ten-year-old can create.
It was a Saturday night. We’d settled in on the couch, me in the middle, Olivia on my left and Alyssa on my right. It’s how we always sit. It works for us.
Okay, so it usually works for us. On this particular Saturday night, when 9pm rolled around, rather than settle down for a nice back scratch and a snooze, Olivia got some kind of insane burst of energy and started bouncing on the couch like a beached salmon.
Basically, she was acting like a lunatic.
I told her several times to stop it and settle down. She laughed.
I moved from the couch to the recliner and ignored her.
She moved closer to Alyssa because, duh, she needed to annoy someone. What’s the fun of being a lunatic if no one is even bothered by your lunacy?
After trying to ignore her for another fifteen minutes, I warned her that if she didn’t stop the bouncing (think full-freaking-body bouncing on her half of the couch) I was going to take her to bed, where she’d be expected to stay while I came back downstairs to finish watching the movie I’d started.
She laughed at me again and so I calmly went over to her, took her by the hand and led her up the stairs.
To her credit, she didn’t fight me. She probably thought I was going to stay up there with her while she fell asleep. I tucked her into bed, kissed her goodnight, told her I loved her and that I’d see her in the morning. Then I left the room.
I went downstairs and sat in the recliner, which is the only seat in the living room from which you can see the stairs.
About ten minutes later, I saw the flash of the book light that Liv often falls asleep holding.
I calmly went to the stairs and found her about halfway down. I turned her around and walked her back up to her bed. I kissed her goodnight again but this time, I didn’t say a word. I just turned around and walked away.
We did this little dance two more times. The third time I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and counted. Seven seconds after I’d reached the bottom of the stairs, Miss O appeared at the top. I took her back to bed.
This time, I didn’t even bother going down the stairs. I stopped right outside the bedroom and four seconds later, she was there, slamming into me because she was so intent on making her way down the stairs.
This time when I started to tuck her back into bed, she burst into tears.
And that’s when I felt like I was actually reaching her. She finally got it. She knew I was serious.
I asked her if she was ready to come downstairs and let me rub her back.
She sniffled and said, “Yes.”
She was asleep about five minutes after we sat together on the couch.
And it appears the lesson has been learned. She started to get crazy again last night and all I had to say was, “Do you want to go to bed alone?”
Nope, she didn’t want to do that. She stopped flopping on the couch and settled down.
I suppose that’s one benefit to “Super-Nannying” a ten year old. They can usually be reasoned with. But sometimes, not so much and in those moments, The Super Nanny techniques actually work.
For the record, I’m counting this one as a Mom win. I need to take the wins where I can get them.
While most of the kids in the episodes of Super Nanny were under five, I got to spend about an hour in a special kind of hell that only a belligerent ten-year-old can create.
It was a Saturday night. We’d settled in on the couch, me in the middle, Olivia on my left and Alyssa on my right. It’s how we always sit. It works for us.
Okay, so it usually works for us. On this particular Saturday night, when 9pm rolled around, rather than settle down for a nice back scratch and a snooze, Olivia got some kind of insane burst of energy and started bouncing on the couch like a beached salmon.
Basically, she was acting like a lunatic.
I told her several times to stop it and settle down. She laughed.
I moved from the couch to the recliner and ignored her.
She moved closer to Alyssa because, duh, she needed to annoy someone. What’s the fun of being a lunatic if no one is even bothered by your lunacy?
After trying to ignore her for another fifteen minutes, I warned her that if she didn’t stop the bouncing (think full-freaking-body bouncing on her half of the couch) I was going to take her to bed, where she’d be expected to stay while I came back downstairs to finish watching the movie I’d started.
She laughed at me again and so I calmly went over to her, took her by the hand and led her up the stairs.
To her credit, she didn’t fight me. She probably thought I was going to stay up there with her while she fell asleep. I tucked her into bed, kissed her goodnight, told her I loved her and that I’d see her in the morning. Then I left the room.
I went downstairs and sat in the recliner, which is the only seat in the living room from which you can see the stairs.
About ten minutes later, I saw the flash of the book light that Liv often falls asleep holding.
I calmly went to the stairs and found her about halfway down. I turned her around and walked her back up to her bed. I kissed her goodnight again but this time, I didn’t say a word. I just turned around and walked away.
We did this little dance two more times. The third time I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and counted. Seven seconds after I’d reached the bottom of the stairs, Miss O appeared at the top. I took her back to bed.
This time, I didn’t even bother going down the stairs. I stopped right outside the bedroom and four seconds later, she was there, slamming into me because she was so intent on making her way down the stairs.
This time when I started to tuck her back into bed, she burst into tears.
And that’s when I felt like I was actually reaching her. She finally got it. She knew I was serious.
I asked her if she was ready to come downstairs and let me rub her back.
She sniffled and said, “Yes.”
She was asleep about five minutes after we sat together on the couch.
And it appears the lesson has been learned. She started to get crazy again last night and all I had to say was, “Do you want to go to bed alone?”
Nope, she didn’t want to do that. She stopped flopping on the couch and settled down.
I suppose that’s one benefit to “Super-Nannying” a ten year old. They can usually be reasoned with. But sometimes, not so much and in those moments, The Super Nanny techniques actually work.
For the record, I’m counting this one as a Mom win. I need to take the wins where I can get them.
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Bad Mom
After her bath last night, Olivia declared that her arms ached. She said she was cold and asked for extra towels as she huddled in front of the space heater while I sweated my way around her gathering stuff to comb and braid her hair and get her into her jammies before she turned into an icicle. She then hovered over the toilet for a few minutes thinking she might puke.
Yes, she’s sick again.
Does it make me a bad parent that my first thought wasn’t my child’s comfort and worry for her health but more like, “How is this going to affect my sleep tonight?”
I’m so tired of sickness around here. And I know! I know it’s only been a few weeks. We’re so lucky that we don’t live with chronic illness. We’re so lucky that we’re all relatively healthy and that this is just a blip and next week, we’ll probably all be well and happy again. Yet, I dreaded going to sleep last night because I was so afraid that I was going to be woken up every hour or so with some request or another.
And look at that, all that worry was for nothing. She slept great (after a dose of acetaminophen) and didn’t wake up once in the night. I, on the other hand, woke myself up coughing on several occasions.
Sigh, if it’s not her, it’s me and that’s almost as frustrating. Yep, mother of the year right here. I’m moving things around to make room for my trophy.
Yes, she’s sick again.
Does it make me a bad parent that my first thought wasn’t my child’s comfort and worry for her health but more like, “How is this going to affect my sleep tonight?”
I’m so tired of sickness around here. And I know! I know it’s only been a few weeks. We’re so lucky that we don’t live with chronic illness. We’re so lucky that we’re all relatively healthy and that this is just a blip and next week, we’ll probably all be well and happy again. Yet, I dreaded going to sleep last night because I was so afraid that I was going to be woken up every hour or so with some request or another.
And look at that, all that worry was for nothing. She slept great (after a dose of acetaminophen) and didn’t wake up once in the night. I, on the other hand, woke myself up coughing on several occasions.
Sigh, if it’s not her, it’s me and that’s almost as frustrating. Yep, mother of the year right here. I’m moving things around to make room for my trophy.
Monday, March 13, 2017
Sick Kid
Last week was miserable all the way around.
Olivia came down with a cold on Sunday. She was sniffly, achy, and whiny; basically, she was miserable and wanted to make sure we all knew it.
The first night, she was achy and so sleep didn’t come easily. She whimpered most of the night, often asking, “Why am I so achy? How can my throat hurt when I don’t even have any tonsils? It even hurts when I yawn.”
At that point, it was around 2:30am, so I gently told her, “If you’d go to sleep, you wouldn’t be yawning and then you wouldn’t be hurting.”
She stayed home from school on Monday but seemed to be on the mend so we sent her to school on Tuesday. When I got home from work, she looked pale and tired but a little better. But her nose was still full of thick green snot. Her right nostril and the area around her nose was red from being rubbed all day long.
And let me ask right here, how does one teach a child to blow their nose? If nose-blowing doesn’t come naturally, how do you teach it? Nothing has ever come naturally to Olivia. But I know that once she learns to blow her nose, she won’t ever forget. However, this particular cold did not lend itself to the learning of blowing her nose.
Nope, instead, she went through a box of tissues a day, wiping that disgusting green snot on a corner of a tissue and then throwing it away and yanking a new tissue out of the box.
I even went out and bought her fancy tissues with LOTION hoping they would be kinder to her nose and the cheek area surrounding said nose.
As of yesterday morning, her face looks better. The redness has healed a bit and she’s on the mend.
I will confess to having given her Benadryl last night and the night before last. Not only was I hoping it would dry her up, she and I both needed the sleep that might come from it.
All this to say that I’m tired. So, so tired. Alyssa said to me one day last week, “Did you know that sleep deprivation is a form of torture?”
I turned slowly toward her and said, “You don’t say?”
By the time she said this it had been at least three nights during which Olivia woke me up at least four times, sometimes for an hour or more at a time. She needed new tissues, or she needed a washcloth to clean the dried snot. Sometimes she wanted a drink of water or she needed to me replace the water in the bottle I’d given her just the hour before with COLD water, thank you very much because this water has been out of the fridge for an hour and isn’t cold ENOUGH. Sometimes, she just wanted company because, hey, she was awake and could I just be awake with her? Hi.
I know we went through about eight years of these kinds of nights but the past two years having been lovely, what with the sleeping through the night five out of seven nights. So five nights in a row of NOT sleeping through the night was torture for me.
So yeah, not apologizing for the Benadryl. Not even a little. Saturday night she only woke me up once. Last night? Not at all.
I’m hopeful that we’re all on the mend at this point.
Olivia came down with a cold on Sunday. She was sniffly, achy, and whiny; basically, she was miserable and wanted to make sure we all knew it.
The first night, she was achy and so sleep didn’t come easily. She whimpered most of the night, often asking, “Why am I so achy? How can my throat hurt when I don’t even have any tonsils? It even hurts when I yawn.”
At that point, it was around 2:30am, so I gently told her, “If you’d go to sleep, you wouldn’t be yawning and then you wouldn’t be hurting.”
She stayed home from school on Monday but seemed to be on the mend so we sent her to school on Tuesday. When I got home from work, she looked pale and tired but a little better. But her nose was still full of thick green snot. Her right nostril and the area around her nose was red from being rubbed all day long.
And let me ask right here, how does one teach a child to blow their nose? If nose-blowing doesn’t come naturally, how do you teach it? Nothing has ever come naturally to Olivia. But I know that once she learns to blow her nose, she won’t ever forget. However, this particular cold did not lend itself to the learning of blowing her nose.
Nope, instead, she went through a box of tissues a day, wiping that disgusting green snot on a corner of a tissue and then throwing it away and yanking a new tissue out of the box.
I even went out and bought her fancy tissues with LOTION hoping they would be kinder to her nose and the cheek area surrounding said nose.
As of yesterday morning, her face looks better. The redness has healed a bit and she’s on the mend.
I will confess to having given her Benadryl last night and the night before last. Not only was I hoping it would dry her up, she and I both needed the sleep that might come from it.
All this to say that I’m tired. So, so tired. Alyssa said to me one day last week, “Did you know that sleep deprivation is a form of torture?”
I turned slowly toward her and said, “You don’t say?”
By the time she said this it had been at least three nights during which Olivia woke me up at least four times, sometimes for an hour or more at a time. She needed new tissues, or she needed a washcloth to clean the dried snot. Sometimes she wanted a drink of water or she needed to me replace the water in the bottle I’d given her just the hour before with COLD water, thank you very much because this water has been out of the fridge for an hour and isn’t cold ENOUGH. Sometimes, she just wanted company because, hey, she was awake and could I just be awake with her? Hi.
I know we went through about eight years of these kinds of nights but the past two years having been lovely, what with the sleeping through the night five out of seven nights. So five nights in a row of NOT sleeping through the night was torture for me.
So yeah, not apologizing for the Benadryl. Not even a little. Saturday night she only woke me up once. Last night? Not at all.
I’m hopeful that we’re all on the mend at this point.
Friday, January 6, 2017
Switching Things Up
As we move full speed ahead toward Alyssa’s fourteenth birthday, we’re moving things around in our house.
I’ve been telling Alyssa for quite a while now that whenever she decides she’s ready, we’ll move Olivia out of her room and Alyssa can have the room they currently share all to herself.
She’s hemmed and hawed for about a year, saying vaguely, “Soon…”
But last week, she declared that she thinks she’s ready.
So we’re working on it.
I’m cleaning out the master bedroom because it’s become a storage room over the past couple of years because yeah, no one has been sleeping in there. But as of next weekend (the 14th) I will be sleeping in there and I can’t do that if there are boxes everywhere. I need my room to be calm and uncluttered and not a storage room.
I also need to make room in the master bedroom for a couple of dressers that are currently in the room that will be Olivia’s in about a week. Her bed, her new Monster High curtains that we’re picking up tomorrow, her clothes, everything will make its way in there and I need to make room for all that. Thankfully, the master bedroom is HUGE and can manage a couple of dressers. Oh and we can’t get rid of those superfluous dressers because they once belonged to Tom’s mom and he meticulously cleaned them up, re-stained them and basically returned them to their former glory and even if we don’t actually need them in our house, they are here to stay.
Alyssa wants to keep the bunkbeds and the full-sized bed that currently reside in her room. She wants those in order to have a place (places?) for her friends to sleep when they visit.
Lucky for her, we have a twin bed still set up in the master bedroom (don’t ask why…just don’t) and it will move to Olivia’s new room this weekend.
This is a grand new adventure and we’re all excited about it. I think Olivia is going to be fine. She’ll still be next door to her sister and I have a feeling she might visit me a few times here and there but I’ll continue the habit we’ve developed over the past year and just walk her back down the hall to her room if she tries to join me in my bed before 6am.
Here’s to a whole new chapter in the life of Ordinary sleep.
I’ve been telling Alyssa for quite a while now that whenever she decides she’s ready, we’ll move Olivia out of her room and Alyssa can have the room they currently share all to herself.
She’s hemmed and hawed for about a year, saying vaguely, “Soon…”
But last week, she declared that she thinks she’s ready.
So we’re working on it.
I’m cleaning out the master bedroom because it’s become a storage room over the past couple of years because yeah, no one has been sleeping in there. But as of next weekend (the 14th) I will be sleeping in there and I can’t do that if there are boxes everywhere. I need my room to be calm and uncluttered and not a storage room.
I also need to make room in the master bedroom for a couple of dressers that are currently in the room that will be Olivia’s in about a week. Her bed, her new Monster High curtains that we’re picking up tomorrow, her clothes, everything will make its way in there and I need to make room for all that. Thankfully, the master bedroom is HUGE and can manage a couple of dressers. Oh and we can’t get rid of those superfluous dressers because they once belonged to Tom’s mom and he meticulously cleaned them up, re-stained them and basically returned them to their former glory and even if we don’t actually need them in our house, they are here to stay.
Alyssa wants to keep the bunkbeds and the full-sized bed that currently reside in her room. She wants those in order to have a place (places?) for her friends to sleep when they visit.
Lucky for her, we have a twin bed still set up in the master bedroom (don’t ask why…just don’t) and it will move to Olivia’s new room this weekend.
This is a grand new adventure and we’re all excited about it. I think Olivia is going to be fine. She’ll still be next door to her sister and I have a feeling she might visit me a few times here and there but I’ll continue the habit we’ve developed over the past year and just walk her back down the hall to her room if she tries to join me in my bed before 6am.
Here’s to a whole new chapter in the life of Ordinary sleep.
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