The bedtime battle

Those of you who are close to me and miss M you will know that bedtime at our house is a nightly struggle and have been a struggle since we made the transition from crib to big girl bed. My baby just turned 5 this past week. It's been a solid 3 years since she said goodbye to her crib and starting making bedtime a nightmare.

From the first week I brought M home I quickly established a bedtime routine. She was bathed, massaged with cream, and rocked until her eyelids began to flutter sleepily. Then I would gently place her in her crib, all snug as a bug, and she would fall peacefully asleep. When she became a few months older I continued the bedtime routine except she'd very often wake up after I tried to place her in bed and proceed to cry for up to an hour. I waited until 6 months before I adopted the 'cry it out' method. I felt guilty at times but for the most part I would simply leave the room, wait it out, and eventually she stopped within 15 min of being put to bed. For a good  year and a half this became the norm. Some nights she was so sleepy that she didn't even put up a fight but usually she maintained crying it out.

The real battle began when I decided it was time for the big girl bed transition. Now she was free. She wasn't held captive by her crib and could roam around her room crying and fighting sleep. She'd bang on the door (doorknobs weren't her forte then). She rarely gave up without a good long fight and it usually ended in me literally rocking her to sleep until she was snoring (yes my child snores like a grown man). Then the day came when she discovered how to open doors. There was no stopping her escaping her room. If she didn't want to go to bed then she'd just come out of her room. I tried every method out there for successful bedtimes. I even followed the "Super Nanny' techniques. It became exhausting. At the end of a long day all any parent wants is at least 1-2 hours of quiet grown up time to relax before we tuck ourselves into bed. I wish I could say that there was this epic turning point where things just magically got better. As if the bedtime battle was just an over extended phase of childhood that she outgrew and she now puts herself to bed. What a dream that would be.

Like I said previously she is now 5 years old and tests her mama's patience every night. I try to keep some of the old bedtime routine in place but life can get in the way. However, she knows when I say it's PJ time that my next words are: 'it's quiet time, let's start getting relaxed and ready for bed'. Then we brush teeth, perhaps read a book, and she is allowed to watch 1/2 an hour of tv in her room. I know some might say the tv is the culprit but tv wasn't a part of her room setup until we moved in with my boyfriend nearly 2 years ago. He said it helped his boys when they were young and I was so desperate I'd try anything. Granted I think it does keep her alert for a bit longer than normal but for the most part she falls asleep. Right, she falls asleep, AFTER she has come upstairs from her room 15-100 times. The other night I was watching a movie with my boyfriend and as soon as I heard 'mommy' echoing up the stairs I quickly whispered to him to tell her I was asleep. He did and she went back to bed and stayed there. The biggest annoyance is that M constantly says 'I have to tell you something'. She uses this line all.the.time. It is her filler for when she doesn't want to do something so she can waste some time. She knows I love having real conversations with her. I used to say 'can I talk to you?' and we'd engage in a talk about whatever was important at that time. I've always encouraged her to speak to me and not be afraid to tell me anything. I love talking with my daughter. BUT, this is just a coy way of wasting time. I will respond with 'what?' and then she sits there and thinks which is usually followed by umm umm umm......I love you or I miss my gramma or I'm hungry or I'm thirsty. Not that I don't love hearing that she loves me or that I'm not concerned that she will starve in her sleep but  I am her mother and I know that saying I love you for the 20th time that night or eating a huge dinner and dessert which makes it difficult to be hungry at 9 o'clock at night is just a sly way of getting me to let her stay up. She wants to stay up, she wants to tug at my heart strings to let her stay up. She's amazingly good at it too. She knows mom's weak spot.  Kids are not stupid!! They are the smartest tiny little people ever!

I know my struggle will end one day, and by one day I mean when she's a teenager. So for now I fully enjoy the nights when she's having a sleepover at her dad's or gramma's because it's one less night I have to spend fighting for her to go to bed (dad and gramma mysteriously don't have any of these same problems when they put her to bed). My one mommy friend is having the same struggle with her little girl as I did with M. I wish I could say it gets better but if she has an M on her hands I can't guarantee anything. Just continue on with a hope and a prayer that you will make it through and laugh about it one day when our babies have babies and they are going through the same thing. Hey, what goes around comes around so LOOK OUT M!

XO
Amber