Girls Gone Wild at Night

My life hasn’t been very SWEET lately, so I haven’t had much to blog about.

Sleep: A new trend of night terrors and waking has become a bad habit. Zoe wakes up screaming bloody murder, nightly around 12:30 a.m. It’s extremely loud, and if I let her “cry it out,” she ends up waking up Maya and Nick. Then Maya is screaming because she’s been woken up by her little sister’s screams. I thought we’d hit a turning point because Zoe started crawling out of her crib (which she’s known how to do for months but just didn’t do). I thought she’d just walk into our room during the night, which is its own problem, but is much quieter and less disruptive to me. But that only lasted about a week; she’s back to screaming again. Zoe also kicks like crazy in our bed. She’ll push herself down under the covers to the foot of the bed and then crawl back up to the head of the bed, constantly, down & up, down & up, for 2 hours! Seriously! It’s impossible to sleep with her kicking in my bed, but she’ll scream her head off and wake the family if I put her in her crib. It’s crazy.

Then there’s Maya. She regularly wakes up around 3:30 a.m. and comes to our room. At least she’s quiet; I don’t have to get out of bed, and she falls quickly back to sleep after climbing into our bed. However, that puts our queen-size bed total up to four people, including one wiggler, who, alone, is one too many people to sleep with. I often move to Maya’s, now, conveniently empty bed, where I sleep wonderfully, alone, however many hours there are left to sleep.

Yet, I have not even mentioned the difficulties we have in getting our girls to GO to bed. This problem started, as I expected, shortly after I started working 4 nights a week. I knew I would lose all control over bedtime and bedtime routines. I was, in a sense, happy to relinquish all responsibility for bedtime to my husband. However, I did not expect to come home at 10 p.m., exhausted and ready to go to sleep, and, on the contrary, find dinner dishes on the kitchen table, girls wide awake, laughing and running around, fully clothed, and without their teeth brushed! At 10 p.m.! After a couple months of becoming grumpy the instant I walked through the door to the excited greetings from my wide-awake girls, I finally had to tell Nick that it would make me . . . “less unhappy” . . . if I came home and at least the dinner table were cleared and the girls were ready for bed. Of course, what would make me HAPPY would be that the kitchen were clean and the girls were asleep, but I decided I might get better results if I asked for the minimum that would keep my mood neutral. So now, after a few months of girls gone wild at night, they are used to (1) staying up until 10-11 p.m. (they are 2 & 3 yr old!) and (2) passing out from exhaustion, with mom/dad, on our bed, which they affectionately call “snuggling.”

Well, I’m at a point where I can definitely count down the days until my Tu, Th evening ESL class ends: May 27, within this month, 3 weeks away, 7 class days left. That’s encouraging but still feels far off. Once it’s over, I’ll be home more evenings to get the girls in a “bedtime mode.” When I AM home for bedtime, it starts right ager dinner, which I make sure ends by 8:00. At 8:00 we brush teeth, put on p.j.’s, use the potty/change diapers, put away toys, and read stories, with lights out at 9:00. But then they want to “snuggle” or the aren’t tired enough to sleep because they’re used to staying up 1-2 hours longer!

The problem is that it’s really taking its toll on me. Why not on anyone else? I’m grumpy, less productive, hooked on caffeine, more emotional (for example, less patient), generally run down, and unhappy. The SWEET Life starts with Sleep, but I haven’t been getting enough for a few months now. That means I’m too tired to Exercise in the morning; too tired to pay attention to drinking enough Water or to Eating a balanced, healthy diet, and I spend what could be Tranquility time “survival napping,” which isn’t the same thing as Tranquility.

How do I get my girls to (1) go to sleep in their own beds (2) at an earlier time? And (3) sleep through the night? In their own beds?