Bedtime Antics...

Ok so, night time has been a bit hairy around here lately. A lot of NON sleeping going on by both me and the kids (and daddy too most nights). Not sure what is going on, but they are each getting up several times a night, leaving me on 3 hours or less a night of sleep for a few weeks now. Needless to say I'm suuuuuuper tired!

So a friend let me borrow her book "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child". Aside from being the most boring book I have ever read, it does have some good tips and points. One being that overtired kids have more trouble getting to sleep and staying to sleep at night. I know Chenda is overtired. The poor thing hasn't had an afternoon nap in who knows how long and rarely goes to sleep before 10pm. Not by my choice in that I WANT her up like that, but it's a relentless fight to get her to sleep. On top of all this getting up at night, just GETTING Chenda to sleep is a fight in itself involving a lot of screaming and crying (and not just by me!! HAHA!) causing a lot of stress on everyone and probably just exadurating the issue. I always figured that she just wasn't tired and would fall asleep when she was.

I know now that I was wrong. She can't sleep because she is SO tired and her body is pumping out adrenaline and other hyper hormones in order to fight fatigue. Thus causing hyper alertness, fussiness, and higher levels of agitation (hence constant fits through the day). *This is all according to the book, but fits her like a T"...So in light of being fed up with no sleep and really not wanting to do any permanent damage to her (according to the book, these kinds of sleep habits usually develop into ADHD and insomnia as they grow), I have decided to implement a new sleep schedule.

After dinner, we will begin our night schedule with a bed time (for now for the sake of easing her into it) of 8:30-9, and wake up time of 8am (eventually I will be making bedtime 8pm and get up no sooner then 7am but no later then 8am), nap time at 1 or 2 and on and on. Of course the baby gets one extra nap in the morning around 11am which she pretty much already takes anyway.

And that puts us where we are now. Chenda is currently up in my room hollering because I am making her take a nap. I promised myself I wouldn't go in there till 3pm to check on her. Because then if she is awake she can come downstairs and we will do bed time earlier, or I will let her sleep till 4pm if she is sleeping. We'll see what happens. I'm glad the baby is easy to get down at this point!!