Kangatopia

Bedtime at my house has always been a tricky issue. When Bear was small – and by small, I mean, before he started Kindergarten – we would sometimes take him to the grocery store in the middle of the night and let him run up and down the aisles until he would wear out so much that we could get him home and get him to bed. We would also drive him around while playing classical music on the radio. It worked really well because, even if we couldn’t get him to sleep, once we did there was no waking him up. We weren’t so lucky with the girls. We tried driving them around, but once they were asleep and we were home – we could never get them out of the car seat before they were wide awake and ready to go again. We couldn’t do the grocery store thing with the girls so much because we knew that it was the kind of thing that only worked with one child in attendance. Two would simply play, not run so much, and two or more always encourage behaviour in each other that we were too exhausted to manage.

So, in order to sleep every once in a while without a 1am trip to the remote environs north of the suburbs, I began simply piling them all in my bed, and we would all sleep together. Every night since Winston was born, Winston and Monkey would wrestle each other for the prime real estate right smack up against, or on top of, Mommy. Bear would generally look for the space on the other side of the bed where there was clearly more room.

Once I moved us into the apartment where we live now, Bear began sleeping in his own bed but the girls would have nothing to do with the whole “Big Girl” concept. To ask them to sleep in their own beds in their own room would be like asking – Oh, insert your own controversial political commentary here. (My ex-husband, the evil conservative, still has control over this site and I can’t afford to piss him off.) There were then two problems. One I had to learn to sleep in a two inch wide, five and a half foot long vertical space with lots of extra body heat keeping me warm on 100 degree nights, and that in order to get my kids to sleep – I had to actually go to bed with them.

Lately, I’ve been trying to change all that in favor of keeping the apartment clean, watching all the Netflix dvds I rent but that take 6 months to view, and spending time with friends (one specifically). So, with the help and support of a very good aforementioned friend, I’ve been sucking up my trepidation over having to listen to the symphonic caterwaul of my beautiful children being made to adhere to a strict bedtime routine without the company of their mother. Tonight was the first night that even though there was crying, the three of them went to bed and stayed there.

Ever since Bear began school, he is the first one asleep and he sleeps hard. So hard that he’s been known to wet the bed because of an inability to wake himself up. Tonight he half walked, half crawled to the bed where he laid down and was immediately comatose. The girls were a little more resistant, but I realized that about 10 minutes after I sent them to their room that not a peep could be heard. Amazed and intrigued, I went to the door and looked through the half inch crack I’d left so that they wouldn’t freak out from the isolation. Bear was snoring. Monkey was sprawled across the bed with her eyes half open – but open in that way that indicates total relaxation – and Winston was pulling Monkey’s hair trying to wake her up. Every once in a while, Monkey would squirm a little and that was how I knew that Winston wasn’t really hurting her. When Monkey would squirm, Winston would plant a little kiss on Monkey’s cheek.

It was sickeningly sweet, much in the same way as bubble gum flavored penicillin. I am so relieved. I don’t know if things will go as well tomorrow night, but I am going to hold out hope that we are on a road to success.