Our children are good at many things.\u00c2\u00a0 But going to sleep at night is not one of them.<\/p>\n
Well, maybe that isn’t quite true.\u00c2\u00a0 Somewhere around age 2, Will became an award-winning, champion sleeper<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Even now, he’s still pretty good about going to bed when told.\u00c2\u00a0 Yeah, he politics and rationalizes all the reasons why he shouldn’t go to bed, but when we are firm he typically listens.\u00c2\u00a0 This is particularly when Kate isn’t around.<\/p>\n Kate does not like to sleep.\u00c2\u00a0 In truth, she’s never liked to sleep.\u00c2\u00a0 When she was a baby, I would lay nursing\u00c2\u00a0 her on our bed with a leg thrown over her legs and an arms thrown over her body — holding her down as delicately as we could — until she stopped moving long enough to nurse and fall asleep.\u00c2\u00a0 This is when she was 4 months old.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s only gotten worse since then.<\/p>\n Looking back at some of the milestone<\/a> posts<\/a> I wrote<\/a> about Kate, each one I’ve found says something about her inability to get to sleep and stay asleep.<\/p>\n At some point this past summer, Paul and I took on the near-death experience of teaching Kate to go to bed.\u00c2\u00a0 We used this Supernanny-inspired hint of wisdom with Will and found it to be a stroke of genius, without the psychologically damaging side effects of other methods.\u00c2\u00a0 The idea is you stay in the room and each time the child gets out of bed, you put them back in.\u00c2\u00a0 The trick is that you must do this, without stopping, for about 5 hours.\u00c2\u00a0 You don’t eat, sleep, talk, use the bathroom, and after awhile, you don’t even think… you just desperately wish for someone to remove you from your misery.<\/p>\n Somewhere in the second week, we found that Kate was able to actually go to sleep after our bedtime routine.\u00c2\u00a0 Granted, she wakes up a few hours into her sleep each night with night terrors — but as this has been a constant in our lives for nearly a year, we were okay with it.\u00c2\u00a0 I do plan on asking her pediatrician about it when we can figure out how to actually see a doctor again… best guesses on this timeline is when I have enough time to wait outside the free children’s health van for the uninsured.\u00c2\u00a0 It’ll take all day for the 10 minute consult, but that’s okay; it will give me plenty of time to think of some really good fake names.<\/p>\n Regardless of how many times she woke up, we were completely blissed out over having successfully conquered a Bedtime Routine that lasted under 2 hours.<\/p>\n We must have been high on life, because we quickly destroyed it all by going on vacation.\u00c2\u00a0 And then spending a week in Mobile, evacuated from our home due to Gustav.\u00c2\u00a0 We kissed all that hard-earned work right out the window.<\/p>\n