Sleepless Insanity

Micah is still not sleeping, and while I know it's just a phase (because he cycles through this often) it's going to be the death of someone. Probably me. Thanks to the suggestion of some awesome readers, we started dropping a melatonin pill in his before-bed cup of milk. The results have been mixed. We are terribly thrilled with the fact that it knocks him right out within a half hour of putting him to bed. Wait. Thrilled may be a loose term here. Think more along the lines of "I just found a unicorn that poops gold coins" and it's probably closer to how we feel than merely thrilled.

There is no more bed hopping. We do not chase him back up the stairs a dozen times after telling him yet again that his drink limit has been reached. We do not have to find a key to open the sewing room door since he locked himself in there and won't come out. He simply goes to bed, lays down, and falls asleep. It's like magic. He could be an Ambien commercial.

But there are side effects that we're not loving. Mostly the fact that going to bed at bedtime facilitates his confused little brain to wake itself earlier in the morning to make up for that lost play time. We're talking 5:15 kind of early, locking himself in the sewing room, dancing the Veggie Tales characters to a sing-along show for the benefit of the many Woodys in the audience. This isnt' good for anyone. Even the Veggies want to just lay horizontally at that hour of the morning. Cucumbers and tomatoes aren't the earliest risers in the crisper.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that the boy just doesn't need much sleep, and I'm trying to change the course of what his natural is. It does seem to make sense, no? Except I know for a fact that he's tired. All the time. Meltdowns happen over nothingness. Or less. If his personal air space has too much air in it, he'll have meltdown. We're just tired of the meltdowns. He's tired from just being tired. It's tiring living like this.

And then we got a note home from school that made us stop and question things. "He seems to be on hyperdrive, like he's jittery all the time." This is not a good thing to hear. The first thing I questioned was the melatonin, and we stopped giving him medicated milk. But reading side effects, I saw things like, "could result in drowsiness the next day." Not exactly the problem we were having, but maybe different people react to drugs in different ways.

So we're still living at the bottom of the cycle he runs us through in the sleep department. And he's been in time out nearly every day this week because he just can't seem to pull himself together at school. And he has meltdowns at home over nothingness and less, but has no problem getting himself up at 5:15 to dance the Veggies to a sing-along in the sewing room.

I did learn from this that the boy still bites his thumb while he sleeps. I'd almost forgotten that he ever did that, and while it was the most annoying thing ever to be invented (because of the accompanying droning noise he generated with it) it's rather endearing now, like a piece of his babyhood still holding on. Silver linings, I guess.