One morning when she was about a year and half old, I woke from a rare, dead sleep to my Lillian singing, “‘ ‘appy ‘appy ‘Alloween! ‘appy ‘appy ‘Alloween!“
It was still dark in the room. Also worth noting, it was nowhere near Halloween. I rolled over and heard a startling, “MEOW?” Her face was two inches from mine. “Meow! Meow meow meow. MEEEEOW!” Then she shimmied down off the bed and began scratching on the door of the bedroom to be let out. It was 6:50. A.M.
On a SUNDAY.
You see, a while ago she decided that she couldn’t sleep alone anymore. Maybe it was some budding fear of abandonment or the dark, but if we attempted to lay her in her crib, she screamed as though we were laying her directly into a fire. Our solution was to push a toddler bed against our bed, so she can sleep in ‘her’ bed, but still crawl over to me if she needs to.
It’s led to some really interesting starts to my day.
More recently there was this:
“Bunnies eat cats.”
She had to say this a few times before I could interpret it. She had just woken up, I assume, and was still laying in her bed in the dark.
“Bunnies eat cats?” I asked. My eyes weren’t even open yet.
“Umm-hmm. And cats eat the bunnies.”
“Okay, Sweetie.”
“WOLVES EAT THE PEOPLE.”
“Right then. Time for waffles.”
I don’t even want to know the details of whatever she must’ve been dreaming about. I mean, again, I sleep only 2 feet away from her.
I am grateful for the sleep that I am able to get now. I had plenty of sleep drama with her sister, but that was nothing compared to what I’ve endured since my youngest and most definitely LAST child was born. I mean Holy Hell, i think there were times I would have been considered legally insane from the sleep deprivation.
Her seemingly random nighttime antics would change-up enough to keep me constantly guessing if I’d ever sleep more than four straight hours again. Somewhere around the two and a half-year point, she began sleeping through the night for the most part, but she’s three plus a few months now and I have these long, concerning bouts of insomnia that I’m convinced were caused by the accumulated trauma of constant sleep interruption.
Oh, and brain damage, pretty sure I’ve got some of that too, and I don’t need science to tell me that but..there’s some science that tells me that.
Assuming she would actually get into bed when she was supposed to, she had this tendency to be just … be…awake. Gleefully. And for hours.
She would decide that she wanted to hang out from 1am until 4am. Or from 3am until 6am. She claimed whatever random chunk of night she wished. She wasn’t hungry, she didn’t need to be changed, she was just done with dreaming for a while.
As much as I would love to exist in her world where time has no meaning, I had to still drag myself up at 7am to take Violet to school, no matter what. In my definite delirium, I started to half suspect that she was doing it all on purpose.
Example:
Like any child, Lily just loves to play in water. Every so often I will put down 45 towels and bring out the water table (it’s this…thing that is meant for outdoors but we don’t have outdoorable weather down here until October) and she will play in it for hours.
But you see, Lily is a girl who likes to make her own fun, so one day while I was napping Violet came running in to tell me that Lily was playing with the water in her little potty.
I was confused yet not surprised. I no longer had the strength to register larger emotions like “surprise”. Now, she couldn’t take off her own diaper, yet the potty was half full of what seemed to be water, various small toys, and off course, Lily’s hands.
After a few minutes and a smell test, I was able to figure out that she had been taking long gulps from her sippy cup and spitting the water into the tiny toilet again and again until she made toilet pool of spit water.
After all that effort she had put into it, I almost felt proud of her. This is why I can’t fall asleep on the job- and I only did so because she randomly decided to wake up for 2 hours in the middle of the night which now that I’m thinking of it might have been part of her Spit Pool Plan from the beginning and that she might be an adorable, villainous little genius.
There was an impressive and possibly dangerous storm one night and I couldn’t give it the attention it deserved because once that impossibly long growl of thunder began I was simultaneously staring at both the baby monitor and Violet’s bedroom door chanting, “stayalseepstayasleepstayasleep“.
When this loud crack of BOOM that I gather made everyone else in the whole city jump five feet happened, I raised my finger and pointed at the monitor and yelled, “NO! Stay ASLEEEEEP!!!“and the small person on the screen rolled over, but did not wake up. Being a completely normal person, this of course convinced me that I, by managing to live on 6 hours of sleep a week, had earned magical abilities.
This sadly turned out not to be the case the following night or any night after.
So for now, she still sleeps in my room, her bed attached to mine. She even still gets a bottle (with mostly water and just an ounce or so of milk) whenever she wakes up because part of parenting is choosing your battles. In the end I chose sleep and the semblance of sanity over sleep training. I do have a family to run here.
