Sleeping Standoff

Today I am pondering the results of reverse psychology. I have decided that this is a complete misnomer because the usage of it, at least on my herd of wild beasts, rarely reverses anything. In fact, I have only once seen it effectively work, and he was very young and very tired. As I write this, my husband claims that he has had repeated success with our 4-year-old minion, to which I repeat with emphasis, “He was very young and very tired.”

 

Tonight I am in hour two of our nightly bedtime standoff. Everybody is so willing to lend advice about how to best achieve a peaceful trip to dreamland for kiddos, but I can truthfully say that the results are transitive at best. Nanny reality television programs have lent us several suggestions, but I believe that it requires an overweight British women with the rectangular frame of a hockey player, teeth like a jigsaw puzzle and a wart named with its own name and zip code to actually achieve success. Being a slight American woman with straight teeth and very mild dermatological problems, these schemes have fizzled.

Routine! It is a nauseating chant that parenting books have been feeding us for years. I can truthfully say, that with very little deviation, my children have had routine since they emerge from their caves in the morning to when they are tucked in at night. It has often yielded an ease at bedtime, but I have also found that it makes for immoveable children. Being a mother requires a degree of flexibility and having airtight routine has horrifying results where an emergency trip to the grocery store may end in a complete structural collapse of the retail establishment. A trip to the local market literally becomes the addition of my family to the list of homeland security risks. Vacations, road trips, these are completely out of the question, because the resulting behavior makes me ponder the need for exorcism.

Nightlights! My darling daughter has had an abject fear of the dark for more years that I can remember. Heeding more well-intended parental advise, I went to our local Swedish import store, which actually isn't so local, but it seemed like a good idea and the gas money and the price of the light were undoubtedly less than the therapy bills or sedatives available as alternatives. I returned home triumphant with two castle-like torches that dimly flickered to provide comfort for our princess in her princess-themed room. The result was many neighbors who knocked on my door at obscene hours to inform me that there was a candle still alight in my daughter's bedroom and I must extinguish it quickly before they called the fire department. This is not an exaggeration— four neighbors! I have decided that the only people who suggest nightlights are people who own stock in lightbulb companies. Of course these dimly flickering monstrosities only use rare-gold-plated-bulbs with filaments made from extinct dinosaur nasal hair or something, because I have spent as much on replacement bulbs, which can only be purchased at my not-so-local Swedish import store, than I have on milk this year (which is an amazing declaration when I am the mother of six minions). 

Guard duty! This is the suggestion from the notorious nanny program, which my mom insists emphatically that I watch. The idea is that a parent campout in front of the bedroom door as a sort of sentry to discourage the children. I heeded this advise and grabbed the closest reading book to keep myself entertained while at my post. I woke the next morning with a horrible neck cramp, a plastic building block stuck to my right cheek, my book splayed abstractly across the hallway floor, and to find that all the children had daintily tiptoed over my sleeping corpse to watch midnight cartoons anyway.

Bedtime bath lotions and potions! Slather your sweet son or daughter in these magical concoctions and they will instantly feel drowsy, or at least that is the claim. Now I am a firm believer in herbal remedies and find that chamomile and lavender ship me off to dream land, but that may be because by dinner time, I am bordering on a narcolepsy diagnosis. What actually happens, besides spending outrageous amounts of money, is when you finally breakdown and “snuggle” (like something out of the WWE) with your clean and greased child, you are lulled to sleep by the soothing scents and the child is able to slip from your headlock and wreak havoc in your house unimpeded.

Out of desperation I tried a suggestion from a parenting book that my mother-in-law sent as a not-so-subtle Christmas gift. I have the most wonderful mother-in-law that a woman could ask for, but for several weeks following every visit, I receive unsolicited gifts of parenting books (don't get me wrong, I appreciate them because it gives me more things to try). It offered that we should make it uncomfortable for our children to not go to their beds. We attempted making them run laps around the backyard in their pajamas, to make them tired. We even experimented with holding cans. This was done by making our children hold cans of food in their straight and outstretched arms for a prescribed period of time. We started with tuna cans, within a week we had graduated to canned vegetables and the cans kept getting larger and larger until we abandoned the project as a loss. I assert that the only thing that this behavior will achieve is in raising mutant super-strong children who will eventually “snuggle” you in a headlock.

But, after hours of struggle, the house is finally quiet. I sneak in a few minutes of ME time, which usually consists of a token shower (my grandmother calls it a “lick and a promise”) and a quick brush of hair and teeth and off to bed. Within the hour the migration begins. The door to my bedroom opens to a fuzzy silhouette and a child scampering into my bed and snuggling sweetly into my right arm. This process is usually not sweet and involves many knees to the groin and elbows to soft spots in my abdomen and quick checks for internal bleeding. This occurs several more times and I am left lying in bed with a child in the crook of my right arm, my left arm, one child across my feet and one lying like a cherry on top of my head, and one firmly between my legs using my cushy midsection as a pillow. With great effort, I usually extract myself and end up watching television on the couch where the process slowly repeats again. It is like that old game “PONG” where I am bounced staggering back and forth slowly between my room and the living room. My husband, who sleeps so soundly I often watch for the rising and falling of his chest just to make sure I don't need the services of a mortician, awakes the next morning feeling insulted that his wife won't sleep with him. I did...off and on for about half the night.

People always ask how I get so much done, and I usually answer that it is because I suffer from insomnia. I would like to make a slight change. I get so much done because I suffer from child-induced insomnia which came on suddenly twelve years ago, although I should have seen it coming because it followed nine-months of uncomfortable tossing and turning.