Raising Richmond: The Sleep Comeuppance of 2012
My son slept through the night for the first time when he was six weeks old. At four months he was sleeping 12 hours straight. But before you hate me know this: I am getting mine now. And it suuuuuucks.
I’m going to tell you something that’s probably going to make you fellow parents hate me.
When our son JR was a baby, the most we ever got up in the middle of the night was twice…and I think that happened maybe four times total. Typically he’d wake up once at around 3am, eat, and go back to bed.
Wait, there’s more.
He first slept through the night (as in, eight hours) when he was six weeks old.
Then at about four months old, he started sleeping 12 hours a night. Save a few bumps in the road due to ear infections and minor teething issues, he went down at 7:30 without so much as peep until morning from that age on. Sure, he’d fight naps from time to time, but once the sun went down, this kid knew what was up. There was no rocking or nursing him to sleep because he flat out wasn’t interested; we’d put him in his crib and he was out like a light.
I know. You want to punch me in the face. And right now I want to punch myself in the face, because I didn’t CHERISH those moments of consistent, blissful slumber while I had them. All that time, taking it for granted, being smug and well-rested. But it’s all over now. Now I’m living in what I’ve deemed The Sleep Comeuppance of 2012.
It’s quite cruel when you think about it. My son, who is now three years old, spent those first few years making us think that sleep was just not something we needed to be concerned about. He let us get confident…comfortable…and then BLAMO! It all basically went to shit.
It started a few months ago when JR decided that bedtime was a plot to kill him. As our nightly routine progresses, he gets more and more desperate in his attempts to put it off, ranging from your straight forward dramatic flops on the floor to the more manipulative declarations that he needs “to go pooooooooooooop”1 and “You’re my favorite friend, Mama, I just need one more kiss…no, three more…no, five more kisses. TEN KISSES I NEED TEN”2 What used to take about 30 minutes now can take hours if you factor in all the back and forth that goes on until he finally conks out.
Naps bring about pretty much the same performance, except he only falls asleep maybe four days out of seven. When he doesn’t sleep, he typically spends nap time shouting the words to his favorite Dr. Suess books, dismantling his bedroom, and/or changing his clothes several times
What’s more, JR recently decided that he no longer wants to wear Pull-Ups to bed. I realize this is something to be proud of, and we are. But not wearing Pull-Ups requires him to have access to the bathroom whenever he happens to need it. Prior to this development, we were actually able to tell JR to not get out of his bed until we came and got him; it just never occurred to him to get up. Now, we have to say “If you need to go to the bathroom, just get up and go, but then get straight back in your bed.”
He hears the first part just fine. It’s the latter half of that statements that he’s having trouble interpreting.
For example, one morning a couple weeks ago, early on in his new Pull-Up free existence, he thought “get straight back in your bed” meant “take off your pants, go downstairs, remove all of the DVDs from the bookshelf, open the refrigerator (and leave it that way), go into the cupboard, grab a bottle of ginger ale, bring it upstairs, and bust into our room shouting ‘PICNIC TIME’, all before 6:30am.”
Since that adventure, we’ve repeatedly gone over what we expect him to do should he have to get up and use the bathroom before it’s time to get up for the day–we’ve even adjusted the restrictions to staying in his room until we come and get him. He can look at books, he can play with his fleet of toy cars, he can build towers with his blocks, we don’t care–just stay put.
I would say perhaps 45 percent of the time he does well. The rest of the time, the reality that he is, well, a three-year-old boy takes over, and he just can’t resist doing the exact opposite of what we ask him to do. Although, to be fair, I guess I never explicitly told him he wasn’t allowed to use the trash can as a stepping stool so he could then stand in the sink and sift through the medicine cabinet. That morning he woke me up by slamming a bottle of Robitussin down on my bedside table and stating matter-of-factly, “I think you’re sick so I brought you this.”
There were so many things wrong with that incident, I…I just can’t talk about it anymore. So, I’m hoping maybe you will. You’ve proven quite helpful before, and I’m hoping you’ll be just as generous with the advice this time around. Now I fully realize that compared to what others have gone through, our situation is small potatoes, but I’m counting on parental empathy winning out here. So give it to me straight: is this just how life is going to be for us now? Am I going to spend the rest of my nights on high alert, just waiting for JR to bust into our room at any and all hours, ready to party? What tricks have worked to make nap time, bedtime, and random wake-ups more manageable for you and your wee ones? I mean other than sedatives and duct tape?
— ∮∮∮ —
Epilogue
Soon after writing this, things got much, much worse. And then they got better. Following a hellish week of no naps, horrible bedtimes, and nightly 3am wake-ups, it finally occurred to us to do two things:
- Tweak JR’s nap schedule ever-so-slightly.
- Take him to the bathroom before we go to bed to eliminate the need for middle-of-the night pee breaks that lead to sink-climbing shenanigans.
As of now, we seem to be back on track. In fact, I mused on Twitter about whether I should even submit this piece for publication since sleep didn’t seem to be an issue anymore. But then my father, in all his wisdom, replied with this:
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/gr810r/status/161442094005760000”]
Good point. History shows us that we shouldn’t get too comfortable with this whole sleep thing. It’s only a matter of time before JR makes fools of us once again…and I start shrieking about it on the Internet for you all to see. I figure I might as well put this out there now so I have your suggestions to turn to in my future moments of sleep-deprived desperation.
— ∮∮∮ —
Footnotes
- What if he actually does? I’m not trying to clean that mess up and clearly we need to encourage putting poop in the appropriate place. ↩
- I figure I’ve got maybe three more years of him actually wanting kisses from me, so I have a hard time turning him down. Yes, I realize I’m being totally played. ↩
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Valerie Catrow
Valerie Catrow is editor of RVAFamily, mother to a mop-topped first grader, and always really excited to go to bed.
Notice: Comments that are not conducive to an interesting and thoughtful conversation may be removed at the editor’s discretion.
Have you tried a rule about no drinks after dinner? We cut Abby off after dinner and give her a sip or two if water when she brushes her teeth. It eliminated our nighttime potty trips.
They also sell nightlights that you can program. They are one color during sleeping time and at an appropriate hour (set by you) it changes color, making it ok to “wake up” and leave the room.
Good luck!
“go into the cupboard, grab a bottle of ginger ale, bring it upstairs, and bust into our room shouting ‘PICNIC TIME’, all before 6:30am.”
I actually laughed out loud at this. (I’m sorry) I mean the rest of its brutal, but being awoken to PICNIC TIME just blew my mind with its…random hilarity.
I also laughed out loud at “PICNIC TIME”. I’m sorry. I do appreciate you publishing this though because last night we couldn’t get Libby to sleep before 9 PM because she kept insisting that she needed to POOOOP. I’m right there with you.
Can you ditch the nap all together? Maybe if he is exhausted from a nap-free/rest-free day, he will pass out hard at 7pm and stay put till morning? Sorry… but your preschooler escapades are hilarious! Thanks for sharing!
I refuse to give up the nap right now. If I put him down at around 2, he’ll still give us around 2 hours. We just needed a shift.
I don’t like to think about what our days will be like without a nap. Eesh.
Yeah, but look what your nights are like WITH the nap. I think you may need to pick your poison.
It occurred to me that these things are so much funnier when other peoples’ kids are doing them…
Karen, shifting/shortening the nap and pushing back bedtime is working so far. But I think we’ve got only a couple months of the nap left. Siiiiiigh.
Karen’s right about the no-nap/bedtime thing, although you certainly don’t want to rush. I remember being frustrated when mine went down for naps and slept past 4, because I knew bedtime was going to be a mess. The only thing more discombobulating than having one give up the nap is having one napping and one not. I spent a lot of time marveling over @HillsHeights and @pagalina being able to go out and DO stuff with their daughter (the same age as my firstborn) when I was hanging out for naps. It’s pretty liberating once you adjust.
A lot of parents probably wouldn’t do what we did, but I got each of my boys his own flashlight and told him he could read after he went to bed, and that’s what they do. That doesn’t stop them from bellowing at me when they decide they need something, but they don’t get up. Corollary: I find LED flashlights (which don’t get hot) and rechargeable batteries to be some of the handiest things to have around with two kids.
I too, had a giggle at the ‘PICNIC TIME!!!’ I couldn’t help it, I’m sorry.
I work in childcare, and nap time with three year olds can be a chore but for some of them it’s so necessary. For the ones that no longer need to nap though, we have ‘quiet time’. Even though they may no longer need a sleep during the day it’s still important for them to have some down time. Maybe when the time comes you could say that he can stay up, but it’s time for quiet activity like colouring in or reading in his room for an hour? It means you can still get your peace and quiet, he gets a little bit of down time too, but he’ll be a little less difficult when bed time does come around?
Although I’ve never had to do bedtime at home (I don’t have any of my own yet) I do remember my little brother being an absolute nightmare. My little sister, brother and I used to share a room, me and my sister in a bunk bed and him in a cot, and when it was lights out he used to stand in his cot and belt out ‘Hush little baby’ for hours on end – inventing lyrics of his own when needed. My parents took the view that he just needed to be ignored until he exhausted himself and went to sleep, but that didn’t work so well for my sister and I.
I, too, laughed out loud at “picnic time” and at the bottle of cough syrup. My sons, now grown, didn’t go through the terrible twos. No, it was the terrible threes. A sign of superior intelligence and parenting, I’m sure.
Your son didn’t sound tired. I’m glad that tweaking nap time and the “preemptive pee”, as we used to call it, are working. When it stops working, ya gotta lose the nap. He might go to sleep at 5:00 and wake up too early, but get out that baby monitor or rig an alarm on his door so that you’ll know if he’s on the loose. He’ll even out eventually.
hahaha, liked the part about “Picnic Time”! Thanks for sharing your parenting experience! I’m going to read a couple more before I log off for the night — definitely time for me to get to sleep before my 7-year-old wakes up :-)