Category Archives: sleep

Bedtime sucks

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The kids needed an early night. Mabel had taken forever to go to sleep last night, and Dash had been late too, and was pretty tired from some big, serious, second-grade tests today and yesterday. (He got extra time for the reading, which was good.)

So at 7.50pm, there I was sitting on Mabel’s bed; toilet gone to, teeth brushed, no more snacks required. I read a chapter of her book. She was a baby tiger who needed to pounce on her bed. Pounce, pounce, pounce, she went, one way and the other. I stopped reading. I was dismissed.

I went into the hallway. She followed to pounce out there. I put her back in her room. She played hopscotch on the rug while I sat on the bed. I left the room. She played hopscotch on the carpet in the hall. I put her back in her room. She put on her silver party shoes, dumped everything from the floor on the bed, and tapdanced on the hardwoods.

I sat in my room and wondered how long this was going to go on. I’m telling myself it’s the half-year thing, because she’ll be five and a half next week; but realistically, who knows? She goes through phases of easy bedtimes and harder ones, and when bedtime is hard she sleeps till 7.30 the next morning, whereas when it’s easy she’s up at 6.00, so mostly it’s just a case of which end of the day we’d rather have it.

Eventually she called me back in and was ready to lie down and have me tell her a story. She was asleep before the fairy godmother had arrived; it was ten to ten.

I think I’ll go to bed now. Tomorrow is another day. Bedtime sucks.

 

Fairytale

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The following episode was recounted to me, because I was asleep – or at least doing my best to pretend to be asleep – for most of it. But it’s classic Dash, so I’ll do my best to reproduce it.

Early yesterday morning – a little too early – Mabel woke up. As usual. I went into her room, agreed that she should go to the bathroom if she needed to, and welcomed her back to her bed with a mumble, as I’d lain down in it and was trying to go straight back to sleep.

I could tell that it wouldn’t work for her, though; she’s been on an early track since we came back from Ireland. Luckily, so has her father. “Daddy’s up,” I told her. “You can go downstairs.” And off with her. I snuggled down for my next hour and a half of sleep, or at least snooze.

About a minute later (I thought), I heard Dash wake up and call quietly, “Mom, Daddy!” (Yes, I’m “Mom” now. I’m still getting used to it.) I laid low and heard B come upstairs. There was some excited talk about how it was wobbly and it was just attached at the corner and then it wasn’t.

                                          Mouth with gaps at top centre right and bottom left of centre.

Apparently – this is where I move to reported speech – the tooth had fallen out. Dash was under the impression that it was the middle of the night rather than about 6.15am. He thought he should put it under his pillow for the tooth fairy right away.

Now, Dash knows all about the tooth fairy and how it really works. But he is busy amassing dollars and imaginary fairies who exchange dollars for teeth are an excellent source of revenue.

B agreed that he should do that, and left the room. Dash put himself happily back to sleep in no time flat, and B went back downstairs to Mabel and coffee and early-morning Internet or whatever it is they do while I’m trying to claw back those minutes of sleep cruelly denied to me.

About five minutes later, as far as I was aware, Dash woke up for the day. In reality it was maybe 30 minutes, and in Dash’s head it was the other half of the night. He must have glanced at his pillow, and failed to see anything. He immediately went downstairs complaining that his tooth had disappeared.

B went upstairs. There was the tooth, in plain sight, about two inches from where Dash’s eyes had apparently stopped looking. B took a silver dollar coin from our room, put it on the pillow, and palmed the tooth.

Then he went back downstairs and told Dash to look again.

“It’s a dollar! The tooth fairy came!”

In some respects, he’s very easy to please.

One of those nights

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On Tuesday I symbolically went to Target and did lots of useful things. On Wednesday – I don’t remember, actually, but let’s assume I did more useful things. Yesterday Dash had a day off school so I didn’t get much done with my two hours of free time, and today I think I’m just going to sit down with a book. Useful things can feck off with themselves. Though I may possibly take a moment to push a swiffer around the floor, because I think the dust bunnies are unionizing.

Last night was one of those nights that when you have a baby you think you won’t have any more when you have big kids.

11:00 I go to bed.

12:20 Dash has a coughing fit. I get up to see if there’s anything I can do. I can’t give him a dose of cough medicine because he’s not actually awake. I attempt a ritual laying-on-of-hands (i.e. putting my hand on his back for a few seconds), which was sometimes all it took to relax him enough to stop coughing when he was younger. Doesn’t work. I climb into bed with him, which also sometimes works, though it’s not exactly simple due to his loft bed, and the thought crosses my mind that I may be approaching creepy Love You Forever levels of mothering. It’s  not creepy to get into bed with your seven-year-old, right? To stop them coughing? Oh well. It didn’t work, anyway. Not for ages.

1:00 or thereabouts: I go back to my bed.

… some other time… I get out of bed again, I don’t even remember why, maybe it was Mabel. Maybe it was more coughing.

… And again.

… And again.

All I know is that I returned to my own bed at 1, 2, 3, 5, and 5:30 this morning, with the intervening periods spent sleeping and/or not sleeping in one of my children’s beds. Then my wonderful husband did all the morning stuff and didn’t wake me till 8:30, when I had just enough time to stick my head under the shower, throw on some jeans (jeans! It’s jeans weather! At least before 9am it is), and run Mabel to school.

Those crazy (upstate) New York summer nights

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There’s nothing like spending seven nights in an 8- by 28-foot space with your nearest and dearest and a very flaky internet connection to make you appreciate the comforts of home. We had fun, we did stuff, but people kept sleeping when they weren’t meant to and then not sleeping when we would have preferred that they did.

Inside the camper van
Camper living

A brief overview of our vacation by the nights, goes like this:

Night one:
I knew we had to bring bedding but I didn’t think to ask if that included pillows as well as pillowcases. I was going to get the kids to bring their pillow pets, but then I forgot. So we spent the first night with no pillows. Now I’m pretty sure when I was 22 I spent an entire summer in London sleeping without a pillow to my bed, but apparently now that I’m Very Old I can’t deal with that any more. Between the bumpy mattress and the strange place and the no pillow, I felt as if I barely got a wink. Dash fell from his pull-out sofa bed onto the floor, but didn’t notice a thing.

Night two:
We spent a large chunk of the next day finding a Sears to buy pillows. One each for the grown-ups and one for Mabel. Dash said he didn’t need one. Insert violas of foreboding here. We all slept relatively well, and I am passionately in love with my new pillow.

Night three:
Dash woke up that morning with a massive crick in his neck. Being not prone to downplay any possible illness or injury, he maximized the melodrama and the whining for the next two days, culminating in the middle of night three when he moved (on his new pillow) and the crick woke him up with a wail of agony (pseudo-agony). Which of course woke his sister as well as his parents. Everyone had to be gently massaged back to sleep over the course of the next hour or so.

Night four:
The previous nights’ discomforts paled into insignificance when we were woken by three long beeps of some sort of alarm at 4am on night four. The trailer/camper/mobile home was fully equipped with a smoke alarm and a carbon monoxide alarm, and we had no way of telling which one had beeped, or why. I put Mabel back to sleep, stepped over the still-sleeping Dash, and conferred nervously with B. We cycled the A/C and opened windows, and nothing further happened, so we lay down again, gingerly. BEEP BEEP BEEP said the alarm again, piercingly. There was no smoke, so we thought it might be the CO alarm. This was not the annoying blip of I-need-new-batteries. I didn’t want to risk it. We got the children up and put them in the car, and all sat there glaring balefully at the camper/trailer/mobile home of DOOM, as the birds started to sing and dawn came creeping in. We tried to call the emergency number for the campsite people, but our phones didn’t work there. We didn’t know which trailer they lived in.  Our own residence continued to fail to blow up or do anything remotely dangerous, but the alarm still beeped every twenty minutes or so. The children did not go back to sleep. Neither, therefore, did the parents.

It turned out to be the smoke alarm, saying that it did, indeed, need batteries. I was not amused.

Night five:
You’d think we’d have slept exceedingly well the next night. We would have, except for the hour or so I spent getting Mabel some water, evicting a moth from her bunk alcove where it was fluttering all over my face (urgh), and finally microwaving her a waffle. Which she rejected.

Night six:
Night six was fine once the massive thunderstorm that rolled in at story time rolled away again, leaving me wondering how people in campsites don’t have trees topple on them every time there’s a storm.

Night seven:
Everyone slept pretty well. We’d finally settled in. Which meant, of course, it was time to leave.

Girl in carseat with pillow
Clutching her new pillow for the trip home

Milestones, tangentially

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I am solo-parenting right now because B is at a conference in Denver. The night before he left, bedtime was horrible and went on for hours, and I was a bit worried about the state of my sanity if trying to go it alone for five nights in a row, but the next morning I stocked up on dollar-store bribes and so far we’re doing well. When he comes home then we’ll have the problem of trying to continue the peaceful bedtimes without bribes, but I’m prepared to cross that bridge when I come to it. This is known as willful ignorance, or ostrich parenting. (I shall write a book and rake in the profits.)

In my bid to exhaust the children, leading to easier bedtimes, I had to take them swimming today. Whereupon Dash swam underwater (with goggles), which I’m pretty sure I don’t remember him doing before, and Mabel took her first ever strokes without wearing a floatie or keeping a toe on the bottom. At not quite four and a half, she beats her brother by a little over six months, her mother by more than three years, and her father by some enormous amount. I need to find my milestones list* and add this.

The reason bedtimes are harder again at the moment – I realise I haven’t told you this – is because I don’t nurse Mabel to sleep any more. Not ever. (I know, she’s only almost 4.5. Don’t think I hadn’t noticed.) Not even in dire circumstances like having nobody to spell me when telling her stories for hours on end. I don’t nurse her back to sleep in the middle of the night either, and she’s sleeping much better (sometimes) (andIdidn’tsaythatpleasedon’tsmiteme) and slept for ten hours straight last night. Alone, in her own bed. Other nights she wakes up twice and then again at 5.15, but she doesn’t get any booboo until 6am, when it’s waking-up boob rather than going back to sleep boob. (Okay, if she happens to nod off again and we all get some extra shut-eye until 7.45 I’m not going to quibble. But mostly, it’s waking up.)

Then we rode our bikes to the playground at Dash’s school – which is very close but was a novelty for two out of the three of us – and Mabel swung all the way along the monkey bars for the first time too. I think her arms will be aching tomorrow.

The weather this weekend was exactly perfect and the way it should be and I want to marry it and have its babies. If it could just stay this way until, maybe, at least July, that would be ideal, thanks.

Blossom, blossom, everywhere

*My milestones list. Don’t you have one? It’s like a baby book, except it’s just a page from a notebook that I started writing on a long time ago and somehow have managed not to lose. I had a baby book once, but it was too nice to write in, so I gave it away.

Code

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I had Mabel’s parent-teacher conference yesterday. I was pretty sure there wouldn’t be much of import to say, but thought I’d better go along anyway just to make sure they didn’t need to tell me she was a sociopath in training or anything. (They didn’t.)

Her teachers opened procedings by assuring me that on the mornings when I pry her off me and leave her wailing in the classroom, the yells have stopped before I’m down the corridor and I’m not to worry at all. Which was nice.

I countered by explaining that those are the mornings when she hasn’t had much sleep. I explained how bad a sleeper she is (though of course I’ve noted this on those days too when handing her over) and how she’s often wide awake for an hour or so in the night, and how I have to go to her and try to help her get back to sleep.

Which left the field open wide for them to tell me what I should do about that. Silly me for mentioning it. They advised not going. I chuckled. (Maybe it was more of a snort.) Or at least a Supernanny-style putting-back-to-bed with no cuddles, over and over, until it sticks, they said.

I nodded and smiled and didn’t say “Well, I’d prefer to go to my child when she wakes and calls for me, because she might actually need me. She might be sick, or have had a nightmare, and I don’t want her to think that she’s all alone and banned from my company just because it’s dark outside.” I only thought of that afterwards.

“No cuddles,” repeated her teacher. Of course, I hadn’t mentioned the booboos component of the putting back to sleep. No need to confuse matters. Oh, fine, okay, so I’m a little embarrassed and don’t want to tell her teachers we’re still nursing at night. If they think I’m a soft touch to be cuddling with her every night, can you imagine what they’d say when I mentioned that she still partakes of the nectar too? Besides, it’s none of their business. But I was conscious of being a bad extended-lactivist.

I nodded and smiled some more, and we talked about Mabel’s “academic” progress (she can cut with scissors!) and social progress (needs encouragement to clean up; needs to work on peaceful conflict resolution, yada yada, four-year-old-cakes), and I took my leave.

It was only later on last night that I realised that Ms S’s references to “cuddles” were code for booboo. Because of course, she’s talked to Mabel about this, and Mabel has no self-censoring device, and Ms S. is no idiot, and hadn’t she just told me that you can have a good, sensible conversation with Mabel? (Not like me, then.)

She should have winked and cocked her head a lot more obviously if she wanted me to understand that she meant “No more booboo.” I’m sleep deprived, so I’m a bit slow on the uptake.

Lower your expectations

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My ambitions for this week are not so lofty as most people’s, I think.

You may be training for a 5k or a triathlon, eating paleo or wheat-free, or implementing all sorts of wonderful screen-free, eating-at-the-table rules in your house, and maybe I thought I would be too, but actually I’m just trying to keep us all on an even keel as body clocks return to normal. Since B decided to add an extra three hours to his jetlag by heading to California for a three-day conference on Sunday afternoon, I get both the bedtime and waking-up ends of the messed-up-sleep stick, which strikes me as a little unfair. The fact that his hotel room was upgraded so that now he has an ocean view and can see the Queen Mary liner from his pillow-top mattress with plush down comforter is just rubbing salt into it.

Tomorrow, I lie in, is what I’m saying. No matter who’s stealing whose markers or hiding whose Barbies or pulling down whose pants.

[At some point while we were away my children discovered the delight of the moon. Not the celestial orb, you understand, but the fact that you could pull down your pants and wiggle your backside at someone and it would be the most hilarious thing ever invented. I hope this is over soon. Maybe in ten years, if I'm lucky.]

So we are unpacked, the laundry is under control, the kitchen is clean(ish), and I have baked and given away most of half a batch of peanutbutter cookies, but other than that chaos reigns. It doesn’t matter: sleep is a priority, and getting everyone back to square one is the vital thing.

I’m sure I’ll get round to training for the 5k and overhauling my diet next week.

Titles are for people who’ve had more sleep

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Jetlag. Bullet points. Two things that go together like jaffa cakes and a cuppa.

  • Irish dishwashers should be made with double the normal capacity on the top shelf, to accommodate all these cups of tea people keep drinking. Or making and forgetting to drink. Somebody get on that, and don’t forget to cut me in on the royalties, ‘kay?
  • We’d hardly been in the country half an hour before Dash asked me “Why does everyone keep saying ‘Thanks a million’? Why does Daddy keep saying it?” He also asked B why he kept calling him Ted. I think someone was returning to his native idioms a bit hastily.
  • I’ll have to explain the Ted thing for 95% of my audience, won’t I? Maybe tomorrow.
  • Travelling was a breeze, except for the A-1 idiot rookie mistake I made of checking the stroller through with our cases. Mabel had been walking the whole time, pulling her little blue butterflies-and-hearts case adorably, and I saw no reason why that should change. (Doh.) As soon as the case went away on the big black conveyer belt of PleaseGetThatBackToMeLater, of course, she turned around to me and said “Pick meeeee uuuuuuup.”
  • We always gate-check the stroller. It’s why we have a stroller. I don’t know what I was thinking. Blame the euphoria of getting to the airport on time in spite of catching our Metro (to the bus to the airport) with literally, I am not being hyperbolic here, seconds to spare. 

[Mabel is playing just out of my line of sight. Every now and then I hear her exclaim "Jesus!"(more like Cheezuz, but whatever), and then I remember that she's playing with the tiny figures in her aunt's crib/creche/nativity that's set up inside the front door. So that's entirely appropriate. At least, until I find out what she's done with the donkey, I suppose.] Ooh, risque Christmas humour. Do I dare?

  • Somehow, I have lost an earring, which is very annoying because I only have the one pair. And now I only have the one. It’s either on the plane, or in an airport, or in any of the three beds I was sleeping in at one point last night, or on the sofa where I was also “sleeping” while Mabel was wide awake at 1am. 
  • The children took turns to be awake last night, which was lovely for them, I’m sure, but not so much for me. Sleep went like this (you probably don’t need this much information, but I have to download it from my brain somewhere):
    - On the plane: 3 hours for Mabel, 2 hours for Dash, about 20 minutes for me, none for B. (He never sleeps on planes.)
    - After we arrived (at 5am local time): Big nap for Mabel, medium-sized nap for me, small nap for B, no nap for Dash, who refused to be tired but got progressively crazier and crazier. High on coke and speed, as his father said. At 3.30 we got into the car and Dash conked out in five minutes. We brought him home and put him to bed, where he stayed …
    - At bedtime: Mabel went to bed at 8pm (very reasonable), I followed not to long afterwards, around 9.30, maybe.
    - In the middle of the night: Mabel woke at midnight, starving. I fed her two pieces of bread with butter and a potato waffle, and after two more trips downstairs, to the bathroom, etc, she finally went back to sleep around 1.30am. Maybe.
    - … and then, what felt like a  moment later, Dash woke up. It was actually 4.30, so I suppose 13 hours of sleep was pretty reasonable, but I was sort of not enthused to see him just then. I fielded him till 5.15 and then handed over to his father and went back to bed until 9am.
  • So things should improve from here, right?

Bare brick and polished wood

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Mabel was wide awake for THREE AND A HALF HOURS last night, alternately wailing “I caaaan’t get to sleeeeeeeeep withouuuuuut boooooobboooooo” and “Reeeeeead meeeee a boooooooook”, and I had the theme tune to Go, Diego, Go stuck in my head; and I was all set to rant about it at length but then it ocurred to me that just maybe it was something to do with the booster vaccinations she got yesterday, and lo, apparently a possible side effect of the Varicella vaccine is insomnia, so I’m going with that because otherwise she’s been sleeping unprecedentedly well and I didn’t even want to talk about that for fear of breaking the streak, so we’ll just move on now…

I just made Dash an appointment for an eye exam, because I noticed that he’s holding the book very close to his face when he reads, and on questioning he said that he finds it hard to make out what’s on the visualizer in school (I think this is the projector thingy that saves the teacher actually writing on the board). Genetically, glasses are highly likely if not inevitable, though I hoped the kids would manage not to need them for a few more years yet. However, it would be lovely if something as simple and fixable as that suddenly turned reading and writing from a chore to a pleasure for him, and I am now fantasizing that being able to see clearly would also make him so happy that The Rage would be a thing of the past and homework would be a breeze.

Just let me dream, okay? If he needs glasses, he’ll get glasses, that’s all. (Not like the last time .)

****************

Meanwhile, what I was going to say…

Yesterday we had ocassion to go to the local high school, because they were offering free flu-mist vaccinations (the sort they squirt up your nose instead of an injection), and both the children needed them. I’d never been on the premises before, though I drove past it multiple times a day before we moved up the road to this house. In fact, I’ve never been in any American high school before.

I know high schools tend to be big, and this is a particularly big one, but I was still surprised by the memories that were kindled when we walked through the doors: not thoughts of my secondary school (grades 7 to 12), but instead a strong sense of the Arts Building in my alma mater, UCD. (That’s University College Dublin, not the University of California at Davis or the University of Colorado, Denver.) Partly it was the size, but mostly it was the architecture: the late-1960s style and exposed brick made me feel that if I opened a door I’d be faced with not a classroom but a vertiginously terraced lecture theatre.

I loved the UCD Arts Block. (That’s Liberal Arts, if you’re American.) It was my place in the world from October 1991 till May 1995, when I left partly because I feared if I didn’t go then I never would. I might have stayed, and done a master’s in Spanish Linguistics, or English Lit, and ended up… well, an unemployed MA instead of an unemployed BA, I suppose. In the Arts Block, I could roam the halls with impunity and claim a sun-drenched low, wide windowsill to read in, or snooze in, or, if lucky and with boyfriend, canoodle in. From the overpriced Finnegan’s Break (oh, har har) cafe to the orange lockers in the LGs, past Dramsoc at the bottom of the stairs and sashaying to the strains of the jukebox from The Trap, where those majoring in pool hung out, to giant Theatre L for my English lectures or an L&H debate on a Friday night, and upstairs again to the Modern Languages corridor where the secretary of the Spanish Department was never around if you needed her, I was on home ground.

There was a wooden set of sculptures in the middle of the building that people could sit on, or around, or arrange to meet up at. The first time I saw them they struck a particular chord, somewhere deep in my memory, and the informative plaque confirmed it: the piece is called Pangur Bán , by Imogen Stuart, and it was first displayed in Dun Laoghaire Shopping Centre in 1976.

When I was three and four years old, I had regularly climbed that very sculpture, peered through its low-down spaces, found the tiny mouse hiding in a corner, delighted in stroking its smooth, cool, dark wood and laying my cheek against it – and here it was in a new location, stirring my sense memories a decade and a half later. It felt like a special, personal discovery, linking me to this new place before I’d even arrived. (Me and every other student from South County Dublin, maybe. But I don’t know if they all remembered it the way I did.)

I felt like a very obvious interloper if I ever ventured into the Engineering Building, I’d only been in Ag once, and Science – despite the fact that my father had helped design it, the ugliest building on campus (it was the 60s; they couldn’t help it) – was just about somewhere I was allowed be once I was dating one of its number, but the Arts (and Commerce, I suppose, grudgingly) Block was mine.

I didn’t realise how right I felt there until I was about to leave. Just standing between the double set of doors at the main entrance by the “Information” desk (I use the term lightly), I knew that I couldn’t hold on to it – I had to move on and make room for the students coming after me. I had no grand plans for the future; I didn’t really know yet what I’d be doing in September, but it was time to go. Closing a chapter, wondering where the next one would open.

A qualified first

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Mabel fell asleep last night without nursing.

I have to qualify that statement a whole lot, but it’s still a first.

  • She has fallen asleep at bedtime without nursing before, for her father a few times, and for the babysitter once – though not for a long time.
  • She falls asleep without nursing in the car, in the stroller, and even in the middle of the night. It’s just falling asleep at bedtime that’s been the sticking point for, well, ever.
  • She did nurse yesterday evening, but (because she’d had a nap) was then wide awake again (demanding waffle, water, music, etc) before finally falling asleep.

But last night, after wailing and crying and demanding and protesting that she couldn’t, she finally lay down and let me start Cinderella, and in very little time, before Cinders had even got to the ball, I’d say, Mabel had yawned twice and her breathing was regular and I was pretty sure she was out. I got as far as losing the slipper before I stopped and gingerly sat up and crept away, but it was a done deal.

Given all those reservations, I’m sort of surprised by this – but all evening I have to admit that I had an odd sense of impending freedom.

Would you take fashion advice from this girl?