No sleep til Brooklyn ... I mean Mexico

In exactly 3 days, I'm going to be sitting on a beach in Mexico, sipping fruity drinks and basking (a.k.a. trying not to get sunburn!) in the warm sun. It's a trip I've been looking forward to for months. Four days in the warm sun with no kids. But as the trip gets closer, I find myself more and more worried about leaving the kids.

I'm not worried about their safety. I'm confident that they will be safe and well cared for while we are away, I'm mostly worried about them thinking we've abandoned them.

Sophia's been having some trouble sleeping these last couple of weeks. It's part of the reason I haven't written in a while. She's not sleeping means I am not sleeping, which means Mommy and Daddy have not been happy campers.

Not happy at all.

It's night terrors and anxiety and with each passing night of no sleep, she gets worse and worse. I swear she's running on pure adrenaline right now. At our whit's end, we decided she needed to sleep last night, even if it meant one of us slept on her bedroom floor.

That's exactly what we did and for the first night in nearly a week, she didn't scream or jump out of bed screaming. Jon put her to bed and sat in her room until she fell asleep. It took her about an hour for her to fall completely asleep, but she did fall asleep and Jon was able to sneak out of her room. She didn't wake up once screaming in terror, instead, at about 2 a.m. she quietly crawled into bed with us and fell asleep until about 7 a.m.

It's a small victory, I know. It's not perfect in the least, but it did give everyone some much-needed sleep. But it makes me worried about how she's going to sleep while we are away. The last thing I want is for the babysitter to not sleep the whole week because Sophia refuses to sleep.

I'm going to leave keeping all my faith on the wise words of my own mother: "Kids are only bad for their parents." I expect they will be perfect little angels for the babysitter and when I come back, she will be wondering why I was freaking out.

How routine falls apart

Every morning at about 6 a.m. Sophia climbs into my bed, curls up next to me and proceeds to kick, toss and turn and whine. This will go on for about 10 minutes until she either falls back to sleep or decides she needs to have juice. Immediately.

This is my alarm clock. I have no need to set a real one, Sophia has always woken up like clockwork … that is until this morning.

This morning, Sophia came into bed and went through her little routine of kicking and tossing and turning, except this morning it was exceptionally violent. I let it go on until I couldn't take it anymore.

"Soph, if you don't stay still you have to go back to your own bed."

"Nooooo," she whined. "I don't wanna."

I look at the clock and it says 2:10.

So I pick her up and take her back to bed. I'm not dealing with this at 2 o'clock in the morning. There's no way. She cries and tells me she wants me, but I'm not relenting. I sit with her in her bed for a couple of minutes and then go back to bed. I am so tired that I fall right back to sleep.
Sophia comes back into my room and climbs into bed. I wake up again, hoping it's at least 6, but when I look at the clock it says 2:40.

"Stay still and don't move or you have to go back to your own bed," I tell her.

She promptly falls back to sleep.

Ryan is a good sleeper. I can count on him to sleep until at least 7:30 every morning. This morning, however, I heard him crying and looked at the clock and it says … are you ready? … 5:00, on the dot.

Again, I stumble through the hall, go into his room and he's screaming. I pick him up, hug him and rock him for a few minutes and he goes back to sleep … for 45 minutes, when he wakes up and screams so loudly that Sophia wakes up. It's hardly 6 a.m. and everyone is up, so our morning begins.

***

On our way to daycare, Sophia said, "I'm a little bit tired, Mommy."

"You should probably sleep at night and you won't be tired in the morning," I said.

"I don't wanna, Mommy," she says.

Ryan is sound asleep before I even pull out of my parking spot.

Pray for me that they sleep tonight.

Sleep, sweet sleep

I think Sophia has taken over this blog. It's been going on for so long that I'm thinking of renaming it The Sophia Diaries. Between her endless screaming in the middle of the night, her refusing to use the potty and running away to play on historical monuments, her antics have taken over my life. But I swear, I really do have two kids and the other is quite busy.

I've kind of avoided talking about him these last few weeks because, well, he's normally a very happy little boy and he recently has not been happy at all. This change came about when Ryan's one-year-old ohmygodpleasecutthroughhisgumsalready molars started coming in. His poor little gums are swollen and red and he is simply miserable, like all his molars are coming in at once. I wouldn't be surprised. The kid has 8 teeth already, not counting the ones coming in. Saturday morning, we found that the top right molar finally cut through the gum. Only 3 more to go!

Now, to get some sleep. Sleep, sweet sleep. I haven't missed you this much since Ryan was first born and would wake up 3 to 4 times a night. Sufficiently Tylenol'd and Oragel'd, Ryan will sleep through the night, and it's a good thing because that big girl bed Sophia is sporting is a challenge for all of us. At least one of us should be getting a good night's sleep and since it's not me, it might as well be Ryan.

Beautiful Princess sheets came in the mail on Saturday and they are washed and ready to go, but we're holding out on her. We've instituted Marshall Law over the sheets. No Princess sheets until she sleeps the whole night in her own bed without screaming for us once. I have a feeling it will be quite some time before that happens.

So, my question, why is it so hard for toddlers to transition to a new bed? In Sophia's case, it's the same damn bed just with the side taken off. The three other crib sides are still up. Why is she waking up? She's always been a pretty good sleeper, so what's changed? Is it newfound freedom that makes children not sleep?

See how Sophia snuck into this post and made it all about her? She is very sneaky.

If you look closely you can see the drool, it's endless!