Some kids don't eat well.
Some kids don't obey.
Some kids don't stop sucking their thumb.
Some kids don't play well with others.
Some kids [fill in the blank].
Our kid doesn't sleep. From the very beginning, Caleb made it clear that Sleep was his arch nemesis, his mortal enemy, his leading adversary. As an infant he'd only sleep 30-45 minutes at a time, and this went on for months. He'd usually wake up happy, so we left it at that, but it became clear after talking with other moms that this was not normal sleeping behavior. This kid took multiple naps a day until he was nine months old because he'd only sleep a little bit at a time. (He was also one of those kids that had to cry it out before he would sleep through the night. That was a rough week, but he did it and we were proud and relieved.) Eventually Caleb transitioned to taking just two naps a day, at which point he also began transitioning to waking up early. I mean, early.
Caleb was about ten months old when it began. He started waking up around 5:30 every day. We thought it must be teething or a growth spurt or something else. But it didn't stop. For awhile he'd wake up cranky because he hadn't slept enough, but eventually he'd wake up happy and ready for the day. Either way, he was definitely awake and not going back to sleep. The early mornings dragged on until we finally resigned ourselves to our new normal: each day began during the 5 o'clock hour, sometimes right at 5am. If Caleb ever slept until 6am, it was a miracle.
Again, this was not normal sleeping behavior.
But he's been doing this ever since. Which means Caleb has been an early riser for over a year and we've been walking zombies for the same amount of time. We tried everything to fix the problem. We kept him up late. We fed him more at supper. We changed his diaper in the middle of the night. We put a heater in his room. You name it, we tried it. Short of giving him Benadryl, which I've threatened to do more times than I can count, it seems that nothing can make this kid sleep in any later.
"Who, me?"
People think I'm tired because I have an infant who keeps me up at night. Nope. That baby sleeps like a champ at night. He goes to bed around 7pm and sleeps till about 4am, nurses for 10 minutes, then goes right back to sleep until 7 or 8. It's bliss.
I'm exhausted because our toddler hates sleeping. He loathes it, despises it, thinks he's missing out on life because of it. We've tried countless times to put him back to bed when he wakes up early (from napping or sleeping overnight, because he often wakes up early from both), and the kid cannot go back to sleep. Cannot. First he cries and screams because you put him back in the crib and left him alone. Then he eventually lays down and rolls around, babbling loudly, interspersing shouts here and there. Let me tell you, no one sleeps through that boy's refusal to sleep. It's exhausting.
Then, to add to our travails, he has recently decided that 5am isn't early enough. The past two weeks he's woken up during the 4 o'clock hour several times, wide awake and raring to go. And he doesn't go back to sleep. This morning he was awake by 4:30 and never went back to sleep. We finally got up with him at 6am.
Even though it's apparent that our child doesn't need as much sleep as the average kid, it doesn't always end well. It's become obvious that he survives and functions on an inadequate amount of sleep and has some level of sleep deprivation at any given point in time, and eventually he crashes. This morning was one of those days. After many days of waking up too early and not napping enough to accommodate for it, he completely fell apart and needed a nap by 9am.
So if you occasionally complain that your child wakes up too early at 7am (which we sometimes hear people do), you will get no sympathy from us. We'd take 7am any day. Shoot, we'd take 6am. That sounds like heaven to us walking-zombie parents!
"I'm on your side, Mama. Sleep is my friend!"
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