What is it with kids and their habit of not sleeping? Can I go back to my own childhood and re-do that? I'd nap then just for the inability not to now.
Micah is a non-sleeper. It took me a long time to figure this out, because by the time he came along I thought I knew the pattern of my own kids. My kids are sleepers. While they were all up at 6:30 in the morning, they were also in bed by 8 at night, and napped well into their kindergarten year. Daily. It was nice. Unless you talk to them, they'll tell you it was torturous. But Micah was different, and I tried so hard to shove his square little self into the round hole that I was accustomed to. And then I realized that the boy just doesn't need as much sleep as the other kids did. Or as much as I do, apparently.
And yet, his lack of sleep makes him tired. When we can't deal with His Royal Crankiness any longer, we make him nap. An hour's nap, though, will keep him up until nearly midnight, making the nap null and void, if not making matters worse than they were before the nap. The solution, of course, is to put him to bed early. He's gone to bed as early as 4:30 already, but that's of his own doing when he accidentally falls asleep in the van and then just doesn't wake up when we bring him inside and toss him into a bed.
Micah is tired. He's having meltdowns for no reason. (Unless there's something wrong with choosing green pajamas over blue ones that I don't know about.) He's had 2 bad days at school this week. He needs more sleep than he's getting. Here's the problem: I'm more tired than Micah is. I'm either feeding puppies when he needs to go to bed, or dragging myself up the stairs for bed when it's his bedtime. If we are going to bed at the same hour, it's a given that I'll be asleep by the time he gets his pajamas on, and that allows him to run rampantly through the upstairs, away from Daddy's radar. Utter failure there.
Last night, Micah ran rampant for 3 hours past his bedtime. It was somewhere around Hour 2 that I said, "there's no way that boy is going to get up for school in the morning. Six is my lowest hour of the day and I don't have the constitution to fight with him. He's just going to miss the bus, and I'll drive him in." Sam and I both tried, repeatedly, to get the boy to sleep, but while you can lead a horse to water you most certainly can't make it drink. If only.....
Micah was up in time to catch his bus this morning. His bus comes at 7AM. Tonight, he's so tired he's having meltdown because Luke is wearing a camo shirt and not a solid colored one. (Yes, for real.) I feel a lather, rinse, repeat cycle coming on. Are there drugs to knock the boy out? Is it ethical? Can I take them to avoid the drama?
The irony is that he'll sleep his teen years away, and I'll be struggling to get him on the bus in time.
5 comments:
I've been following your blog for a couple years now Karen, and enjoy each and every post!!! Just now started a blog, so wanted to leave a comment and say thanks for the laughs over the years. We eventually want to adopt a DS child from the Ukraine, and I appreciate the honest, real look at Micah and all that comes w/amazing kids like him. :)
Hi Karen
Have you tried Melatonin for him? Alot of kids with autism use it to fall asleep. We have been using it for 3 years with Eric. You can buy it at any drugstore it is with the vitamins we buy the liqwid for Eric and add it to his bedtime milk or you can get a capsel and disole it in a drink. You should google it and read about it might help you/
So sorry that the sleep saga is continuing. Does it help at all to tell you that there HAS to be a light somewhere in the distance?
I second the melatonin . Even my hubby uses it to slept some nights...
Thank you, guys, for the Melatonin tip. I'll definitely be getting some to try.
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