Postponing sleep is one of Olivia’s and Hailey’s specialties. Their creative energy is abundant in finding new ways to evade falling asleep and when they persist with self induced insomnia Kim and I get frazzled, occasionally making rash decisions, unwilling to give up the one hour a day we claim as are own.
Olivia used to be in the habit of stretching (a sometimes pseudo or sometimes actual need to go) after-hours potty visit into a ten minute book perusal. During one of these incidents, spurred by fatigue I became annoyed, establishing a spontaneous decree with no forewarning, “I am officially banning books while on the toilet after bed time!” Olivia was confused. “No books!” I repeated. She cried for a good fifteen minutes at the sudden uncompromising rule modification. Kim glared the ‘nice going Homer’ look as she soothed Olivia but took my side, agreeing with the change, “Sorry honey, daddy said no.”
Olivia excessively relies on the bathroom excuse, usually two visits a night after being tucked-in. She also likes to stay up ‘reading’ scanning as many as ten books and a few times has fallen asleep with a paperback covering her face. Bathroom and books are moderately permissible. Her creativity upholds near the twilight of sleep, she will snoozily call on me or Kim with a governors-plea, “Close my closet door all the way,” even if it is closed. Or “There is a fly in here,” there is no fly. Or “You forgot your toy brain,” by that time we need a real one. She dreams-up something new almost every evening. What she really wants is one more reassuring kiss before entering the scary realm of night terrors. Nearly every night she will violently thrash and scream in the depths of slumber, which is bewildering and disheartening for me and Kim. No wonder she balks sleep.
Every so often Kim and I blurrily see through the hazy frustration of Olivia’s sleep-strife to find comic relief and emotional buoyancy. Recently, in the midst of a post-been-put-to-bed toilet pardon, while glancing up through the bathroom blinds, she noticed a three-quarter moon and proclaimed, “Daddy the moon is broken.” Grumpy and tired I couldn’t help but laugh and then started to explain that the moon has different phases. But she stopped my explanation short with her newest favorite phrase, “we’ll talk about that later daddy.” Her verbal abilities and emotional uninhibitedness amaze and sappily harness me. A few nights ago, after story-time on her way to bed she exclaimed, “You’re the best daddy.” Kim gushed. My head inflated to the size of a hot-air balloon. That comment was worth more than any pay check I have ever received. Proactive flattery is what I was thinking an hour later as she still would not fall asleep calling for me to obtain her Ariel wrist-band-compact-mirror-lip-gloss toy. Thanks to Kim’s archetypical modeling, Olivia will look good when facing her sleep-demons.
While I’m on the subject of sleep-demons; Hailey has been testing her limits with Kim and me for the past couple weeks. It started innocently, right after being put to bed she would shed her nighty and diaper then toss them out of the crib along with anything else that wasn’t nailed down, calling for mommy or daddy to come pickup her blankey, all her stuffed toys and re-dress her. After several nights, she progressed from disrobing and tossing one time, to three or four times, this new game quickly became vexatious. I decided to let her remain naked and have her cry-it-out, upping the stakes. Kim was at odds with this decision for good reason. Hailey loves a new challenge and countered with urinating in her crib. So then the game became Kim or I having to dress her and change the crib sheets, which was much to Hailey’s delight being that she was able to get out of her crib for a few extra minutes and watch mommy or daddy work on getting her bed cleaned-up. Great idea dad. In one week she went from playfully undressing to malevolently whizzing all over the place. Once or twice we ran out of clean linens, she went through four sets of sheets and had to sleep without anything but a wet cover, eventually falling asleep naked in a pool of her own urine.
The problem reached a boiling-point this week during our ‘daddy day’ siesta. Hailey had stripped and was shouting, “dah…diee!” from her crib for over an hour, then she became eerily quiet. My ‘dadar’ alarmed me and just as I was about to enter her room she hollered, “daddy I poo-poo!” I opened her door and she was hopping up and down in her crib, little poo-poo nuggets flying everywhere. The language that followed was of the ‘R’ rated variety. I hooked her underarm which was the only clean part of her body, yanked her from the crib, tossed her into the bath tub and dropped the soap bar in her lap. “Clean yourself up!” Then I went to disinfect her room, probably a good thing too, that gave me time to cool down and strategize. I concocted a plan that involved Hockey tape. After her cleansing, I wrapped plastic tape around her diaper, the same adhesive I use to lash my equipment to my body. It didn’t take the little escapist long to wiggle out of that continuing to elude nap-time and seemingly mock me, “dah…diee!” So I persisted, wrapping the tape around her shirt and nighty pants. That didn’t work either, she was naked within minutes. Defeated, I retreated to bed, covering my ears with pillows attempting to drown out her victory cry, “dah…diee!” She did eventually take a short snoozer, three hours after the start of nap-time.
I had lost that battle but the war was not over. I had a new plan. I called Kim on her way home from work requesting she stop and buy diaper-pins. That night, (last night) Kim pinned Hailey’s nighty shirt to her pants, six pins, it looked like a Houdini stunt in the making. So far the tactic appears to be working and for the past two nights she has fallen asleep, clothes pinned together, without a fuss. Kim and I have won back our hour, for now.
Originally posted on BabyCenter.com 10/19/06
