They say that one of the biggest frustrations of parenting is when our kids do the things to us that we did to our parents when we were kids. Well if that’s true Savannah, here is a peek into your future:
At 1:30 in the morning your blissful night’s sleep will be awakened by the sound of an alarm clock somewhere in the house. Thinking it is your daughters, you will wait for her to turn it off. When she does not, you sleepily trudge upstairs to switch it off yourself. After tripping over a toy container in the hallway and setting off Ariel’s car alarm, you realize the children were playing with the clock in the guest room earlier in the day and find your way through the pitch dark to turn it off.
You will then head back to bed with thoughts of continuing that good night’s sleep.
But forty five minutes later you will feel a child crawling over you to get under your covers. “What are you doing?”, you will ask. “I want to sleep with you and Daddy,” your 5 year old daughter will say. Out of complete exhaustion you agree that she can stay, roll back over, and close your eyes.
She starts talking.
You remind her it’s the middle of the night and she needs to go to sleep.
She starts sniffling. Not because she’s upset, but because she has the same cold that everyone else in the family has been suffering with.
You hand her a kleenex from beside the bed and try to go back to sleep.
Five minutes later she is crawling over your legs again and out of the bed. “Where are you going?” She replies, “I need a tissue.”
“I just gave you a tissue.”
“Yeah, I used that one already.”
When she crawls over you the 3rd time your patience is beginning to waver. Your voice gets stern as you tell her it’s time to go to sleep. No more monkey business. And you will roll over actually expecting to go to sleep. It is 2:30 in the morning afterall.
But then the coughing starts. Hers. Not yours. You were actually getting the best night’s sleep you’ve had all week. So you get up to get her some cough medicine.
When you bring back the little plastic cup and ask her to sit up she whines, “But I can’t seeeee it. Turn the light on. I have to seeee it.” So you turn on the small light over the bed and she grabs her eyes and cries, “It’s tooooo bright!!!!!!!!! It hurts my eyes!!!!!!! Turn it off!!!!!!” Oh the drama you will encounter with your little one. How I will laugh.
So the light goes off and there is much discussion about how she prefers the grape medicine over the berry flavor, but there is nothing you can do about it at this hour, so you nicely tell her to just drink it already and refrain from grabbing her nose, tilting her head back, and tossing it to the back of her throat as you would to a dog.
At this point you are a little edgey and decide to grab a quilt and crash on the couch for the rest of the night. You are about 1 minute from sleep, beautiful sleep when you hear tiny footsteps on the hardwood coming your way. You pretend to already be sleeping but she starts talking anyways. “Mommy, where’s Stafford?” With your eyes still closed you say, “In his crate. Go back to bed.”
She says, “Hmmm…can I sleep out here instead?”
“Why?”, you ask because it’s usually a huge treat to sleep in your bed.
“Well it’s super duper comfy.”
Fine. You agree and tuck her in thinking that will be the last you will hear from her until morning.
And you will be wrong.
A few more minutes go by and she comes back to your bedside. “Mommy, I hear a strange noise.” Everything within you wants to scream “JUST GO TO SLEEP FOR THE LOVE OF PETE!!!!!!!!!”, but instead you explain that it’s probably the refrigerator and it’s okay to go back to bed. She leaves your side yet again.
Not 10 minutes pass when you are startled to see the lights go on in the living room. By this time you’ve reached your limit. You fling off the covers as your husband asks what is going on. You will ignore him because after all, he has been totally oblivious to the nights event thus far. When you get to the living room you scan it looking for the miniature version of your self. And when you find her, she gets her final ultimatum.
“Pick a bed,” you will say. “I don’t care where it is. Just pick one and go to sleep. It is the middle of the night. I need to sleep and so do you!!!!”
As she starts crying about being scared of the dark, you cut her off and inform her the lights will be out for the night in 5 seconds. She better get where she wants to be. Any compassion you may have had was definitely gone by 3:15 am.
She decides to climb into her own bed and when you flip the light switch the crying gets louder. You go back to bed assuming she will eventually fall asleep and your only concern is that her wailing might wake up her brother. Your husband on the other hand asks you why you are being so mean making her go back to her room. He can’t see you glaring at him in the darkness as you answer him through clenched teeth that she was given the choice of where she wanted to sleep for the rest of the night.
Then he gets up, calls her name and she is silent. He asks if she would like to sleep with us. She says yes and he explains that if she comes down to our bed, she must go to sleep.
And she does.
At this point now you can’t sleep because you are recalling the nights events in your head. You then realize you’ve got some pretty good blogging material here and that gets you up and on the couch at 4:30 in the morning in front of the bright light of your laptop, shaking your head and laughing as you realize that yep, one day your daughter will have one just like her, too!
2 Comments