Sleep begets sleep and all that

I talk a lot about my kids' sleep habits. At least, I feel like I talk about them a lot.

Charlie loves sleep and only fights bedtimes when she's overtired, which means then she's going to be awake at the ass crack of dawn trying to break down the gate to Cereal Land where she can wreak havoc and mayhem. I'm not usually griping up a storm about the Goober, and really haven't done so since I put my foot down when she was 15 or so months old and forced her to learn how to self-soothe (which is my nice way of saying I broke down from exhaustion and gave into a modified "cry it out" method).

So, when I mention sleep habits these days, usually it's how shitty the sleep habits are and that I'm tired of being held captive in my own bed by the one and only Josie. That kid likes to stay up late no matter how tired she is, and then I'm forced to listen to her rant and rave when I leave the room, or I sit there with her waiting for sleep to take over.

It's the middle of the afternoon and I want to go curl up in my bed right this second and take a nap - which is exactly what the younger child is doing. She's such a lucky little shit to have someone force her to rest so she has energy for later. But instead of me taking any sort of power nap, I'm sitting in a dark corner of the basement with the effervescent Bean while she watches a DVD of old Clifford the Big Red Dog episodes and thrashes about on the floor.

And now she wants to know where the money is. You and me both, kid.

The random things that come out of her brain never cease to amaze me.

However, I much prefer her randomness during the day as opposed to at bedtime. Her screaming about not wanting to get her hair trimmed ever are getting old. I mentioned it a few weeks ago. WILL NEVER LIVE IT DOWN.

It's part of her delaying bedtime tactic - she brings up everything she can think of to get upset about and then refuses to settle down. It's new and worked for a while. I was sympathetic to her not wanting to get her hair cut, to her not wanting the box spring under her mattress, even to the reasons why she didn't want to sleep with her stuffed frog. After all the delaying and the arguing at bedtime for the last several months year, I made the brilliant decision to just let her stay up as late as she wanted, or until I went to bed, in the hopes it might make the "go to sleep" transition easier.

I was so wrong.

She wasn't in bed before 10:30 p.m. or asleep before 11 - and I wanted to run away. You hear that, Internet! I wasn't even compelled to start drinking. I simply wanted to run off into the wilderness where perhaps a pack of wolves might adopt me as one of their own.

I've gotten used to my kids getting up super early if they stay up really late, so like an idiot I thought this new theoretical non-bedtime idea would work to my benefit. That I might make it to the gym even at what I consider a normal time. Turns out I was wrong.

And I haven't been to the gym in almost two weeks.

From Friday morning, but pretty much the daily scene. I was between them.

Rather than waking early, she slept ... and slept ... and one morning finally woke up around 10 a.m. Other mornings I was making as much noise as possible to wake her up from a floor below and was practically encouraging Charlotte to play with all the loud toys she could find - also not my best idea of late.

Now, I'm absolutely exhausted. And she absolutely is a reflection of her namesake, with the whole staying up until the news comes on.

Last night I gave up on the non-bedtime and we attempted bedtime again at a normal hour.
It wasn't horrible. She was asleep by 9:30ish. For Josie, that's pretty good.

I was even in bed by 10:30, which is practically unheard of.

At some point in the night both kids ended up in our bed as usual.

I don't know if this is progress, but it's ... well, it's something.