We are all sleep deprived, but oddly enough the one suffering the most is Rachel. That girl!
Our goal is to have her be in bed by around 8:30 or 9:00 every night and we really don’t struggle with that goal very often. She’s pretty good about going to bed most of the time. She’s even mostly good about staying in bed. It’s the going to sleep part that she won’t do.
We don’t have bedtime battles for the most part. She just stays awake in her room until 11:00 PM or later and then is usually the first person awake. Sometimes she’ll call us into her room at 5:00 and complain that it’s not dark anymore so bedtime is over. Sometimes she’ll wake up at a more logical hour, but still not a very logical hour for a two-year-old who falls asleep at midnight.
Naptime may or may not happen. She always goes down for a nap but I’m not sure how often she actually falls asleep. I asked her once if she had a good sleep and she said,
“No. I didn’t. I just lied down and I played and then I camed out of my roon.”
So at least she’s honest, but, oh, so very tired!
This morning Andrew went out to have a shower and Rachel ran out of her room to greet him, acting chipper—like she’d been up for hours. She needed to have a bath so they ended up co-showering, which meant that I got to sleep in—I don’t know how I’m going to get to choir at 8:15 on Friday mornings when I don’t get up until 8:30 (after falling asleep (for the first time) at 4:00 then waking up at 6:00 and at 7:45).
Things were fine…until Rachel fell over. Because she fell asleep. While standing up. In the shower.
Andrew started watching her closely after that. She’d start swaying and her eyelids would droop and then her head would bob and then Andrew would wake her up.
The girl is tired!
But what can we do?
You can give a child a bedtime but you can’t make them sleep.
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