Musical Beds (But with coughing instead of music) (Babble)

I think compared to many families we’ve had fewer issues concerning bedtime.  I didn’t have a lot of choice when my husband was deployed both times about establishing some sweet routine with stories, etc.  I had too much to do and I was too exhausted all the time, so I simply got my kids trained early to put themselves to bed.  We read, we cuddle, we do all kinds of nice together things, but we tend to do them before bedtime.  Bedtime here consists of us saying, “Go to bed.”  And they go upstairs and get undressed and brush their teeth and go to bed.

My girls have always been very happy in their own beds.  Even when they are sick or there is some reason for them to come snuggle up on my bed for a while, they tend to want to go back to their own space to finally sleep.  When they were small I never let them cry in their cribs or their beds because I wanted where they sleep to always feel like a safe, comforting place to be.  I don’t know if that really worked or if the outcome I was hoping for was just a coincidence, but here we are.

For Quinn it’s always been a different story.  He was born during the first deployment and I don’t think remembered his dad very well when he returned from the second.  My son is attached to me in a way that straddles the line between charming and overwhelming.  When his dad was gone, Quinn wanted to sleep in my bed.  There was room and I didn’t mind.  But he would still sleep in my bed every night if he could, even though now with his dad home there really isn’t room.  We started moving him after he fell asleep to his bunk bed, and that worked for a bit.  However, he’s lonely in his own room so we got him a little mattress for the floor of his sisters’ room.  The girls are not thrilled with it, but they let it slide because they know it makes him happy.  He loves being part of the action as they all giggle past lights out, and he was good there.  For many months with this arrangement I was able to say that all my kids stayed in their own beds at night.



But the amazing thing about raising children is the lack of absolutes.  You may think this kid is a good eater, or that one is fearless, or the next one is fine sleeping in his own bed at night, but wait a day.  Everything can change and then you have a whole new list of habits and preferences to deal with and that becomes the new normal.

So right before Quinn’s tonsillectomy he was having trouble sleeping and started showing up in our room at night.  He couldn’t sleep and he wanted to curl up with me.  It was hard to refuse so I didn’t try, but it’s hard to even describe how our quality of sleep has suffered.

The worst nights are when the dog is in the bed, too.  Because at first I’d have Ian trying to sleep on one side, Quinn on the other, and the dog sort of flopped on top of me or between my knees or wedged somewhere odd.  That whole arrangement makes me claustrophobic.  Especially since Ian, Quinn, and the dog all have a habit when they are unconscious of filling any gaps around me.  If I shift, they shift with me to remain in contact with my body.  It reminds me of something I read a long time ago about how people buried in sand end up crushed and suffocated because when they exhale and create a gap the sand fills it in and leaves less space to inhale each time.  Quinn is like a sweet-cheeked mound of sand next to me in the bed.  Sometimes we make Quinn sleep in the middle, and that helps somewhat because I have an escape route that way, but it’s still not great.

After Quinn came home from the hospital he was extra needy about wanting to snuggle with me at night, and really, a sick kid kind of trumps everything.  So there have been many awkward nights around here, because even though now he’s better he doesn’t understand why he can’t stick with this new habit.  And somewhere between midnight and five in the morning Quinn winds up in our bed.  When we can, we wait for him to pass out and we move him back to the girls’ room, but when you’re exhausted there are many nights it just seems easier to stick it out.

When it’s too much, either Ian or I flee.  Usually to the couch downstairs.
The added twist to all of this lately is that I’ve been really sick this past week.  Ian’s consultations with Dr. Internet seem to conclude it’s acute bronchitis, but I’m on the upswing.  I’ve been through an unholy amount of kleenex and have been coughing like mad but I’m finally feeling stronger and should feel like myself again soon.  Quinn and Mona have been coughing a little bit, and Aden has had a cough for about a month but otherwise they all seem fine.

The hilarious thing about all the coughing (because you take humor where you can find it when you are sleep deprived and sick) is that it worries the dog.  Chipper is like some nervous hypochondriac, and anytime someone coughs he gets up and leaves.  So at night he’s been up every few minutes trying to settle into a cough free zone.  He’ll start off in our room until I cough, then he’ll trot down the hall and curl up on his dog bed in the kids’ room until Aden coughs, then he return to us. 

The other night it got so bad Chipper decided to give up on family togetherness completely and took up sleeping on the couch.  Which works great until I end up down there if Quinn’s in suffocate mommy mode.  The dog looked so devastated the other night when I showed up in the living room with my pillow I thought me might muster the ability to speak just so he could say, “Nooo!”

The winning night of uncomfortable sleep improv was when I fought my way out of the heap of Ian/Quinn/dog madness and tried curling up with Aden.  She was vaguely awake and I asked if she’d mind and she looked happy to have me, so I put my pillow at the end of her bed and hugged her feet for a while.  After a few minutes Mona realized I was there and started to come over too, because boy didn’t that sound like fun to all pile into Aden’s twin bed for a sleepover.  I told her I’d snuggle up on her bed next time (even though Mona’s tightly tucked system of many covers seems almost as claustrophobia inducing as my overcrowded bed).  This worked for maybe an hour when I gave up and headed for the couch again, which I really don’t like because it does nasty things to my shoulder for some reason.

So there’s that.  We’ve been at this for so many weeks now that it feels routine but I’m so tired of it!  Or just tired.

Last night when Quinn appeared in our doorway right at bedtime I was able to say no.  At 2:00 a.m. I admit to not being able to think clearly about reasonable parenting ideas, but Quinn was trying to shift things into a newer even less fun routine and I had to send him back down the hall.  He looked so hurt I could barely stand it, and when he curled up on his little mattress he started to cry.  But I let him cry.  I have never been a ‘cry it out’ mom, and I certainly never expected to have to employ that strategy with a five-year-old, but every day (and every night) can bring something new in this parenting game.

Quinn still ended up in my bed around 4:00 a.m. but it wasn’t bad.  Every time I had a terrible coughing fit he put his little arm around me.  I was sick enough that I don’t think I had much chance of sleeping anyway, and it was nice to feel adored even in my least appealing moments.

But I’m looking forward to a day in the near future when I can take breathing for granted again, and if I’m very lucky, get back to a routine that involves everyone sleeping in their own designated spots.  Lofty goals, I know.  Martin Luther King Jr may have had a world-changing dream, but I just want to catch enough sleep to have any old dream at all.  (Even that one where you show up at school and you’re naked or don’t remember what your classes are.  Sounds awesome about now.)

I've been dumped for someone younger! (Babble)

No, not by my husband.  By my little boy!  My little Quinn who likes to snuggle at night has ditched me for his older sister.  It’s a good thing, probably, but I miss that little warm body in the bed.

About once a week I have an evening rehearsal and my neighbor comes over to put my kids to bed and sit in the house until I get home.   Quinn has never been happy about going to sleep alone, so sometimes I would come back and find him still up with the neighbor waiting for me to arrive, and sometimes he would have passed out wherever he was despite his best efforts to stay awake.  But in the past couple of weeks he figured out a new solution:  Share Aden’s bed.

Aden also loves a good snuggle and seems to like adding a real live boy to the pile of stuffed bunnies she hugs all night.   After a couple of rehearsal evenings in a row the pattern was set.  Quinn now expects to crawl in next to his sister for the night and so far they are both happy about the arrangement.  They giggle and hunker down under the covers and somehow don’t get in each other’s way once they fall asleep.

There are several advantages to this new system.  The first is that Quinn is going to bed at a reasonable hour for a change.  He used to follow me around until I went to bed, no matter how late I stayed up to wash dishes and get the house in order.  His sisters go to bed somewhere between 7 and 8, so this is better.  It also means he gets up in time for breakfast.  In my bed he would just keep sleeping until I scooped him up to put in the car when I drive the girls to school.  Now that he’s in the belly of the squeaky beast he gets up with the girls before 6 in the morning and gets caught up in their squeaky start of the day playtime.

I like not fighting anyone (however small and dimpled) for covers, and stretching out as far as I want in bed, but I miss the company.  I liked the giggle time and the way Quinn nuzzled up behind me as he slept.  I liked seeing his little blond head first thing in the morning and hearing him tell me sometimes that it was daytime outside and I needed to get up.


It’s funny, because I used to feel a bit disapproving of people who let their kids sleep in their bed.  Not disapproving in a harsh way–I just didn’t understand it and couldn’t figure out why anyone wouldn’t correct that right away.  With Aden and Mona I used a co-sleeper when they were first born.  It was nice to have them conveniently within arm’s reach of the bed without being in it.  It made nursing them easier and gave me more opportunity to rest than if I’d had to get up and go to another room in the night to find them. 

When Aden hit the three or four month mark and started sleeping through the night we moved her to the crib.  I waited a couple of extra months past that with Mona just because I was concerned about the girls sharing a room and waking each other up, but that turned out not to be a problem.  They tune each other out as they sleep.  I cried the first night they each spent in the next room and I was left with the monitor next to my bed instead of a baby.  It was hard, but it was for the best.  I believed (and still do) that parents should have privacy in their own bed and kids need to learn to sleep on their own.

But there are few absolutes in parenting, and you can never make assumptions about what things with the next kid will be like.  Quinn has always been a different story.  He was born during my husband’s first deployment and was about 8 months old when his dad came home.  Without Ian in the bed there wasn’t any particular need for privacy, and I had concerns again about possible room sharing issues since three kids in one room seemed like a lot.  I enjoyed having Quinn next to me at night and starting the day with his little hands on my face and his smile as my alarm clock.  He almost never cried and was my happy constant companion.  I didn’t start trying to move him over to his crib until about a month before his dad was supposed to come back from Iraq.

I’m trying to remember now during 2008 and most of 2009 how Quinn slept.  It’s funny how things that consume your life fade when you move past them.  We converted his crib to a toddler bed when he was about 18 months or so, and eventually got him a big kid bed with drawers underneath like his sisters and he was very proud.   With Ian home we tried to get Quinn out of our bed.  I’m remembering a lot of nights where we’d wait for him to pass out next to me and then we’d move him.  There were some nights Ian would give up and sleep downstairs rather than wait Quinn out.  If I wasn’t home at bedtime, Ian reported that Quinn simply went off to his own bed at the same time as his sisters without a fuss.

Quinn had some trouble warming up to his dad when Ian came home from that deployment.  I think he mostly sees Ian as competition for my affection and attention, and he doesn’t like it.  I’m expecting similar problems in the fall when Ian finishes this deployment.  It made simply kicking Quinn out of the bed difficult, because we didn’t want him to resent his dad even more.  How do you convince a child that he’s not being pushed aside in favor of some strange man, when you are literally pushing him aside to make room for some strange man?  I didn’t want his dad’s return to be a bad thing in his mind, but he was happier with the way things were before his dad came back, and part of that was sharing my bed.

In any case, before Ian left again Quinn was pretty good about sleeping in his own bed, but as soon as space opened up next to me at night he slipped back into it.  I don’t sleep well by myself so I didn’t mind.

But now I’m on my own again.  It takes me longer to fall asleep and bad dreams creep in more often without my cuddle boy there to ward them off, but I recognize it’s a step in the right direction.  The fewer things that Quinn has to adjust to when his dad eventually returns, the better for us all.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the new house.  Quinn has a few sleeping options aside from crawling in bed with me or one of his sisters.  He has a little mattress on the floor of his sisters’ room in case he wants to use it, and in his own room he has a new little bunk bed he picked out at Ikea recently.  That makes six different spots to crash upstairs alone so I’m sure something will appeal.  In the meantime, it’s nice watching my kids treat every night like some happy sleepover event.  That’s better than the sweetest of dreams.

Taking Sides (Babble)

I’ve been thinking lately about how it’s probably unusual that Ian and I never staked out certain sides of the bed. Most couples I know who share a bed seem to establish fixed sides. It makes sense, especially when you have nightstands on either side to store your things. My dad’s side of the bed has always had a crossword puzzle next to it, and my mom’s a book and the alarm clock. Ian and I always just went to sleep wherever on the bed. If I’m there by myself I’m in the middle, and often (when he’s home) if I’m there reading or working on something, Ian will stand at the end and say, “Well, which side am I on?” before he gets in.

When we started having kids, we dubbed the two sides of the bed “The Working Side” and “The Vacation Side.” Whoever was in charge of getting the baby in the middle of the night took the working side, and whoever was allowed to sleep through it got the vacation side. As the kids got older, the working side mostly meant whoever was going to make breakfast. Before Ian left for his deployment he tried to give me the vacation side of the bed as often as possible. After he left, the whole thing was just “the bed” and it didn’t really have sides anymore. It seems too big when it’s just me in the middle, and often when I have the bed to myself I sleep diagonally just to use more of it up.

But after Ian had been gone a few weeks, Quinn asked more and more often if he could sleep in my bed. He has a twin size bed in the same room as his sisters, and at first he would let me put him to bed when they went down for the night because he liked the ritual of it, but after a minute he would get up and come into my room. “Can I sleep in your bed, mom?” he would ask in his sweet little voice, holding his stripey blanket and beaming up at me with his dimples and his squinty eye. How can I say no? There is plenty of room and he is a sound and gentle sleeper. After a few nights in a row of letting him come to my bed, I came upstairs to find he’d simply set himself up with his own pillow and a blanket, a few stufffed animals and a book. He gave me the proudest smile when I found him there. He’s been there pretty much ever since.

I was worried it would be a problem when his dad came back for Thanksgiving, but he was surprisingly good. I explained every night for more than a week beforehand that when Ian was here he’d have to sleep in his own bed. Quinn did stay in his own bed all three nights of Ian’s visit, but I also promised he could come back to my bed if he wanted when daddy left, and I think that was the key to his compliance. The day Ian flew back to Fort Polk, Quinn set up all of his things again on the far side of my bed.

I know a lot of people have issues about letting kids sleep in your bed, and normally I tend to agree with that. When Ian is home there isn’t room for an extra body in the bed. I make exceptions for when one of the kids is sick or has a bad dream, and Ian and I kind of draw straws to see which one of us is headed for the couch downstairs rather than all of us being uncomfortable in one bed. More often then not, however, the girls prefer their own beds, and I’m glad. I like that they like thier beds.

But things have always been different with my son. During the last deployment, I was pregnant with Quinn for a good chunk of time, so he was technically with me in the bed then. I used an Arm’s Reach co-sleeper after he was born, so he was next to me for months. After I started putting him into his crib at night, he’d still want some cozy snuggle time in the morning in my bed. He was nice company then and he still is. I’ve heard people say that letting kids sleep in your bed does not count as spending ‘quality’ time with your kids, but I disagree. There is a lot of cuddling and giggling, and I like that I’m a source of comfort even when he’s not conscious. He likes to press up against me at night, and if I move off into my own space he pats around in his sleep until he finds me and cuddles up again. It’s nice.

And frankly, I don’t sleep well alone. By myself I lie awake and my thoughts tend to race around. I obsess about things both big and small and I get restless. On bad nights I even scare myself with where my thoughts go. When Quinn snuggles up I’m just happy. He’s warm and dear and he reminds me I’m loved in the middle of the night when I’m most likely to feel lonely. I like to think I do the same for him.

By the time Ian returns from Iraq next fall, the plan is to shift around all of our sleeping arrangements anyway so that Quinn will finally have his own room. With a little luck, all the crazy transitions happening then (Ian being home, Quinn starting school, moving things around…) should distract from the fact that he’s not sleeping next to me anymore. We’ll see. It’s impossible to predict what his needs will be in a year on a lot of levels, not just surrounding sleep.

In the meantime, barnacle boy remains by my side both day and night. There are times during waking hours where I dream of a break, but never at night. The bed feels better with him in it. So after years and years of sharing a bed with my husband and not developing a habit of staking out a particular side, I now share the bed with a bitty boy who has become entrenched on one side, with his toy cat and his copy of ‘Caps for Sale.’ It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I am always on the working side.

The Stuff of Dreams and Nightmares (Babble)

Aden called to me from her bed the other night.  Bad dream.

We taught her a couple of years ago about lucid dreaming, and how she could control the contents of her dreams a bit if she needed to, but lately it’s been getting away from her.  She told me several weeks ago over breakfast that she’d had a bad dream “Not like a nightmare, nothing bad was happening in it,” but it was uncomfortable.  She didn’t like the color of the clothes the people were wearing, or the length of their sleeves, and she wasn’t able to change it, and that bothered her.  I told her if nothing scary was happening it would probably be more fun to just let it go and be surprised by whatever the dream wanted to be.  She thought about that for a moment and agreed to try to be surprised.

But her dream the other night was just downright scary.

She said there was a doctor trying to hold a frantic little creature and it kept eating straight through his hand.  I agreed that sounded gross and freaky and told her I’d lie with her in her bed for a little while.  She loves that.  She smiled and made as much room as she could for me and I put my arms around her and she was content.

Someone told me years ago, before I had kids, that when a child wakes up from a nightmare you never ask them to tell you about it, because then they relive it and it becomes harder to shake.   On one level that sounds reasonable to me, but on another it doesn’t.  I’m actually less likely to talk about a good dream, because all dreams seem somewhat ridiculous when described out loud and I’d like to hang on to some of the nice ones.  Even my worst nightmares were drained of at least some of their power once I told them to anyone.  I’ve had some pretty frightening dreams that have stayed with me a long time, but all of them have to be acknowledged as fiction once they’re out of my head.

With my kids’ dreams, there is the added factor that I’m just curious.  And if they’re dreaming about things that stem from fears in real life I want to know.  But as with everything to do with parenting, it depends on the child.  Aden almost always tells me her dreams and nightmares if I ask, and Mona refuses.  The last time Mona had a bad dream after seeing a cartoon that scared her a few months ago, she could barely stand to admit she needed comforting.  I was supposed to sit on the bed and look the other way while she huffed and said she was fine until she fell back asleep.  If Quinn wants me in the night he comes and finds me himself.  He has no fear of the dark.  All of my kids as babies looked as if they were dreaming about eating during most of their sleeping hours.

Lying with any of my kids in his or her bed at night is amusing to me.  All three of my kids currently share one room, and I’m always unprepared for how noisy it is.  I had a room to myself growing up.  There were times I thought it was lonely, but overall I liked having my own room and it took time to adjust to roommates in college.  My kids are so used to all being together that they’ve gotten good at blocking out sounds of restless shifting in other beds or the soft snores and breathing of their siblings.  Mona occasionally yells at her sister in her sleep, and Aden never stirs.  Quinn sleeps through an amazing amount of loud squeaky girl games in the mornings.

I stayed with Aden until she seemed relaxed, gave her a kiss, and told her I had to go back to my own bed if I were going to get any sleep myself.  She understood and went back to sleep.  I think she mostly just needed to know I was only one small cry of, “Mama!” away.  She keeps asking if we can invest in walkie talkies so she can call to me at night, and I keep reminding her that I hear the slightest peep from my room next door without any electronic gadgets at all.  The bad dreams my kids have are few and far between, and I’m relieved that a brief snuggle has been enough to fix them.

Personally, I used to have a lot of tooth nightmares.  I’d have a dream about once a week about my teeth falling out.  The last really vivid one I remember involved me holding in one of my canines while being driven in a cab to a dentist at night, and by the time we arrived I discovered that while I was holding in the one tooth, all the others had fallen out without my noticing.  There is no way to receive adequate pity for such a dream because it’s too stupid.  I remember the feeling of horror that accompanied it while I had it, but even I know it sounds laughable when I describe it.  Every once in awhile I’ll come across another piece about dream analysis that will include something about what tooth nightmares are supposed to represent, but they are all over the map and none of them sounds reasonable.  I sincerely think I’m probably nervous about losing my teeth and in this case the tooth shaped cigar is just a cigar.  The tooth nightmares, along with my daily bout of hiccups, both mostly disappeared once I got pregnant the first time.  I don’t have a clue what that’s about.

In any case, I haven’t noticed any increase in nightmares in the kids since their dad left, and I’m glad.  It is among the greatest gifts I can offer my children that they feel safe in their beds at night.  Ian’s deployment may have complicated their daylight hours, but at night there appears to be no change.  Most of their dreams remain sweet.
I hope it’s a long time before they realize that true nightmares happen when you’re awake.