I Stand Triumphant

Kenny, who is generally a stellar sleeper at night, has morphed into a nighttime terror.   Bedtime, which used to be  a sweet twenty minute ritual, has become one that stretches two hours, only to have him wake at 4 or 4:30, pathetically tired, but refusing another minute of sleep.

This usually happens whenever we return from a trip (which is unusually often for our little family), and typically takes a night or two of letting him cry for fifteen minutes or so to straighten out.   But it’s gone from bad to worse since his anything-but-vacation in the hospital last week.   It started because we slept in the same bed with him in the hospital for three nights.   Then, because of his fragile state and to watch for the fever to return, we stayed in his room for several nights when we got home until he was fast asleep, then returned to hold him if he woke up (which he did, genuinely scared) in middle of the night.   Then his Grandparents arrived to take care of him as I prepared for my surgery.   When I returned from the hospital and he saw me swollen and puffy from the I.V., drugged from the meds and unable to hold him at all, he got, understandably shaken up.   The two days I was in bed he wanted nothing to do with me; he would run in to see if I was still there, then run back out again, saying “All done, Mama.”   It was hard to go through for me, and I can only imagine how odd it must has been for him.

So he was having trouble sleeping, as his grandparents started staying in there to make sure he was asleep, then got up to hold him when he woke up in the middle of the night.   The length of time of each of these instances got longer and longer, until two nights ago, when I was actually well enough to go out on a much-needed date with Casey, we returned home to learn that Kenny had just barely fallen asleep before we got home.   And at four the next  morning, he started calling, Papa went in, and the whole house was up by 4:30.   The exact same thing happened last night.   No joke.   This resulted in an inevitable and ugly meltdown this morning at 9:30, when the exhausted Kenny just could not  take the sleep deprivation anymore.   Unfortunately, we were in the car, and by the time we got home, did he want to nap?   Yeah.   And I want to have another extemporaneous organ removed.

So Casey and I laid with him in his room for over an hour, trying to get him to nap.   That worked about as well as the time I tried to teach Dudley to fetch a diaper.

The worst part of it all was that I was 100% aware that we were only making the problem worse by giving in to his demands that we stay in his room.   So tonight, with Casey and his dad off to an Arizona Diamondbacks game, and with his mom on my side, I put him to bed with his normal routine and left the room.

He screamed for forty minutes.   I went in and comforted him.   He screamed for another fifteen.   Casey’s mom suggested that I go outside where I couldn’t hear him.   I did.   He was asleep five minutes later.

Victory.   *sigh*

Now let’s see what happens tomorrow morning at 4, when all family members have been banned from entering Kenny’s room until it’s light out… Stay tuned….