is a good night of sleep! Is that too much to ask? As a parent, you expect the first few months of a child's life to be sleepless. That just comes with the territory. When they got to be 2, I thought I would just have great nights of sleep. Unfortunately at my house, that hasn't been the case and I will assume that lots of parents share my sentiments about wanting some sleep or dealing with kids who just randomly appear beside their beds in the middle of the night!
In the past month or so, we've started a new bed time routine and F2 actually gets to sit in story time with the boys. She doesn't just sit thought, so story time is quite a mess! She used to go to sleep before the boys, but I have been trying to get the boys in bed earlier, which meant she'd have to go to bed super early. This was my compromise. The problem is now I end up laying in her floor waiting for her to fall asleep because she gets out of bed if I don't stay until she's out. That has messed up my nightly routine.
She's also started getting out of bed in the middle of the night to get in bed with me. It's usually a huge ordeal because she has to have all of her paraphernalia which means multiple trips to her room and turning on lights to find her dolly! That darn dolly! I don't always mind it and if I'm super sleepy I just go with it. It's hard for me to sleep, though, because I worry about her falling off the side of the bed.
Some nights she wakes up crying because she's fallen out of her toddler bed. Those nights she's pretty easy to get back to sleep.
Some nights, like tonight, she just randomly wakes up at 11:00 or so and is wide awake! She will come find me and tell me she wants to watch TV! I don't mind snuggling with her for a little while, but she's not easy to get back to bed. I've spent an hour and a half tonight trying to get her to go back to bed! After her 4th attempt to sleep in my bed that I'm not even asleep in yet, I finally have convinced her that she has to sleep in her room.There's a high probability that tonight's issue isn't resolved.
I have this mystery situation on my hands where I'm not sure why she's waking up most nights. She's not running fever or acting sick. The only other issue I can think of is maybe she's getting her 2 year molars and she's in pain at night. Nevertheless, she's waking up and not always desirous of going back to bed. She's very hard headed and doesn't just turn around and get back in bed when you tell her to. It's quite the ordeal, actually. I'm thinking she may be a prime candidate for a sound machine because she'd have something soothing to listen to and it may block out any noise she's hearing that may be waking her up.
All the kids have gone through this at some point or another. F6 slept in the bed with me almost every night from the time Cpt left for his first deployment until F2 was born. F4 has gone through it the least, but he's shared a room with F6 for a few years now. He always has company and has no real reason to get up. He's also a very hard sleeper and isn't woken easily.
It's just one of the negatives of parenting that I guess never goes away. My one saving grace and the reason I'm not willing to let her quit napping during the day is that I often fall asleep with her and get a little extra rest in the afternoons.
Truly, if someone were to ask me what they can do for me to really help me right now, I would have to tell them to let the kids spend the night one weekend night so I can catch up on my sleep! Any takers?
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