Bedtime Prayers

If you're a parent, you've inevitably come up against the bedtime blues. Unless your kid is better about sleeping than mine is. In which case, I hate you, and you are ordered to leave this blog now.

This didn't used to be a problem for me. My mother cursed my name when E started sleeping through the night at 4 months (right about the time I went back to school, thank goodness). All up through the age of 2, bedtime was pretty much a breeze. Put baby in crib, turn off light, baby falls asleep, sleeps like a rock, and doesn't wake up till morning. Perfect! I was filled with sympathy for (ok, more like lording it over) those poor parents with croupy babies or light sleepers or any of the myriad of sleepytime woes that parents come up against.

Well, God saw fit to pay me back. In full. More like ten times over.

E is terrible about bedtime. Absolutely terrible. And for a kid who is generally easy-going, adjustable, flexible and surprisingly obedient (including a good eater, ridiculously clean and a great sharer, excuse me while I boast), I suppose it is fit punishment that bedtime is so difficult with him. He screams, cajoles, gets up, kicks, throws, scratches, and generally makes a nuisance of himself for at least an hour after bedtime.

Things started getting bad my senior year of college, when E was about 2 and a 1/2. All of a sudden, I noticed that my study time was dwindling fast and the culprit was clearly the screaming demon down the hall. And it made me feel so guilty, too, because I lived in on-campus apartments, where the walls were thin, so I'm sure that my neighbor (sorry, Henry) spent many a sleepless/studyless night while E resided on the other side of his bedroom wall. I did everything I could to fix things: kept E to a strict schedule with daytime nap included, worked out a long bedtime routine that never changed, made sure he didn't have caffeine or sugar in the evenings, insisted he stay in his own bed, and did everything that should have worked. And it sort of did, but bedtime was definitely not a party at my house.

But then I moved back home with my parents the summer after I graduated, and things quickly deteriorated even further. My mother is of the "if you lay down with him, he will sleep" mindset, so I let her try it. It got to where she would be laying down with him for over an hour before one of them (inevitably my mother) would finally succumb to sleep.

And then medical school started. I blithely put E back on his steady schedule, determined to be firm/strict/hard-nosed about bedtime, and refusing to let a puny 3 year old stand between me and my textbooks.

Apparently, I'm not too good at this parenting thing.

Bedtime is now a constant battle. And I'm not sure where I've gone wrong. I keep having to come up with different tactics to ensure he goes to sleep before midnight, and before you doubt, I promise that I have tried each of these for at least a month, if not two. But the little devil keeps working around them, so then I have to alter things! It's not my fault, I swear!

First, there was the "set the timer and check on him every 10 minutes". Well, that worked for a little while, but then when I would check on him, he would ask me to stay until the timer went off. And the time he wanted me to stay became longer and longer, while I kept trying to make it shorter and shorter. And then he became terrified of the timer's ring. So end of that story.

Then came the "I'll lay down with you until you fall asleep" tactic. I figured, my mother's a pediatrician, she knows what she's talking about, right? Well, apparently, my son knows more than she does, because I would either fall asleep and waste my entire evening or when I would leave, E would wake up. Not good options.

Somewhere in the semester came the "Let him cry it out" strategy. That worked for about one night, and then it turned into "Bring him back to his room when he gets up" strategy. E's not one to take things lying down. He's more the type who will vociferously voice his opinion in your face, rather than down the hall. And I was leading (note: not carrying, because you're supposed to minimize the reward of attention, blah blah blah) him back to bed more frequently than every 5 minutes. I'm sad to say that most often, a light smack on the butt and a stern word did more than all my silence and patience put together. What can I say, he's a stubborn kid.

More recently came the "Mommy will study in the hallway where you can see her" phase. That worked ok, despite E's tendency for striking up conversations with me while I was trying to focus on neuroscience, but then the hall light burned out and Mommy didn't have the time to buy a replacement or the height to utilize a replacement. Too bad, kiddo.

So now we're back to the timer phase. And oh, Lord, please help me keep one step ahead of this kid. Because he's swiftly defeating me.