I’m exhausted and I’m not done working yet. I’ve still got two kids to put to bed.
Today (In no particular order) I:
Did all the bugeting and banking and setting up folders and clearing out cabinets to set up book keeping for 2005.
Ran load after load of sorely neglected holiday laundry. Folding is looming now. Literally. Some of those piles are ready to topple.
Failed to get Patches to nap despite cruelly leaving him in his crib for extended periods of time where he acquired a self-inflicted (and parental guilt inducing) bloody lip.
Put up with excessively cranky Patches for the rest of the day.
Took down and stowed my Huge Christmas Tree.
Took down and stowed everything else which even remotely looked christmasish.
Hauled boxes of Christmas stuff downstairs to hide until next year.
Fixed meals.
Picked up kids from school.
Met the mother of Kiki’s school friend so that going to play at his house is possible. There is friendship potential there for me as well. It bodes well.
Required kids to do their homework.
Rocked Patches for 30 minutes because even though he was (finally) asleep, every time I tried to actually put him down he’d wake up and scream.
Helped Kiki and Gleek trade beds. Again.
Read stories to Gleek and tucked her in.
I’m hoping that what comes next is peaceful bedtimes for Kiki and Link followed by happy and uninterrupted Buffy viewing and Sleeeep.
Failed to get Patches to nap despite cruelly leaving him in his crib for extended periods of time where he acquired a self-inflicted (and parental guilt inducing) bloody lip.
[snip]
Rocked Patches for 30 minutes because even though he was (finally) asleep, every time I tried to actually put him down he’d wake up and scream.
Indigo, my (not for much longer) youngest, is too smart for her own good. We put her crib away because she could climb out of it at about 13 months, and we couldn’t find the “turn the crib into a mesh covered trap… tent, I meant tent!” thing that my wife’s sister gave us for our older daughter. So she’s been on a toddler bed for the last … six months or so, which is useful only as a place to put her after she is firmly asleep.
Well, last night my wife found the mesh trap thing, and I put it over the top of her toddler bed. It actually worked out pretty well. She liked it at first, you know, new, fun, oooo, this is cool. After Lion King was over and her little TV shut off of its own accord, however, she wasn’t very happy. She was most of the way to sleep by then, so there was no real screaming involved, just some sobbing and and pleading, not too much more than the wife and I could stand. She went to sleep before whatever we were watching intently to keep ourselves distracted was over, and slept until 2am.
You see, she’s getting four molars in, and she got a cold or something on top of it. A little robitussin (“rub some tussin on it”), a little triaminic, and a sippy cup full of apple joice (she hasn’t been dehydrated, but when they’re sick, I let them drink all they can… to Mordor with the diaper bill, I say), followed by about five minutes cuddling in mommy and daddy’s bed, and I laid her down inside the trap, expecting a fight. I told her that if she went to sleep nice, I wouldn’t zip it up, so she could get out when she woke up.
She went to sleep nice.
Oh yes, naptime will be in the trap, it will.
We used this thing to good effect with Scarlet, though we started earlier. Also, Indigo seems quicker to figure some kinds of things out than Scarlet was, so I wouldn’t be too surprised if she just gets to accept it, and decides rather quickly that going to sleep nice is better than being zipped in the trap.
On the other hand, Indigo is a lot more stubborn than Scarlet as well, and I would further not be surprised if she fights it.
Or, she might do both.
I share this story because The Patches Adventures of your day sound so terrifyingly familiar. The bloody lip, particularly, is one of the reasons we put her crib away. She could climb out of it, safely, about 3 times out of 5. Yeah, that was fun, as I’m sure you can imagine.
sleeping kids
Ah, the joys of trying to make them sleep. Until she was four years old, Kiki wouldn’t go to sleep unless I lay down with her. Four Years. It got really old. I did it to myself really, and I wasn’t experienced enough to know how to undo it. Howard and I both had much lower tolerances for crying back then. I’ve never trapped myself that way again. I’ve learned how to be mean and require them to sleep in their beds by themselves.
Gleek was (and is) a climber and had to be removed from the crib at 18 months. I didn’t have one of those cool sounding bed-traps. Instead I childproofed the room and put a child-safety knob on the inside of her bedroom door. In essense I turned her whole room into a playpen. She fell asleep on the floor alot.
Patches has yet to figure out that he is capable of climbing out of the crib. When he does the crib mattress will go on the floor and the doorknob will go back on the door. I’m hoping for another year in the crib, but I doubt I’ll get it. Another six months would give him time to develop so that I can reason with him using logic rather than coersion.