Why won’t they go the EFF to sleep?

I mean seriously? What is it about children that then seem to never, and I mean NEVER feel the need to sleep when it is dark outside? I mean sure they are good at sleeping randomly in the middle of the afternoon or on car rides, not when you are planning on them sleeping though, but they seem to have the ability to take a nap whenever.

But at night, when you want to sleep that seems to be a completely different thing. And one they can’t seem to manage. I have four kids and two of them have been good sleepers since infancy and two of them, not so much.

Right now (and I am not trying to make any changes because we are in the middle of moving) my girls all go up to bed at the same time at night, usually around 8:30. We don’t do nightly baths, we don’t necessarily read bed time stories (though we have been reading Harry Potter aloud for a while now we are still 150 pages away from finishing the Order of the Phoenix) we just say good night and send them upstairs. Yes it then takes them half an hour to brush their teeth and do whatever else they have decided they need to do before going to bed, and some nights we have to get involved and remind them.

And some nights they come back down the stairs multiple times, though in the last few nights it has only been once or twice. But they still need to come down at least once.

My almost 12 year old is dealing with the stress of home-buying by starting out the night in her bed and then moving to a nest she has made on the floor at the bottom of our bed around about 1 am in the morning. Most of the time my husband and I sleep through it and apparently she does as well, because she often seems confused as to how she got there the next morning.

My youngest likes to stall the longest about actually getting into her bed, though most of the time she seems to fall asleep reasonably quickly, but she most certainly likes to dictate the stories they tell each other, or the songs they sing or whatever the fuck else they do before actually surrendering to sleep.

My middle two daughters are sleeping in more lately. Which is fine since we are homeschoolers I really don’t care that much. It only becomes problematic if my eldest thinks we should read Harry Potter at breakfast and I refuse to read it if not everyone is up. I also refuse to allow her to wake her sisters up.

I know all of this is going to change soon. We are going to move from a 3 bedroom house to a four bedroom house with dedicated office space for me to be in the morning while they are still probably sleeping. They will have more space in the two bedrooms they get, and there is always an adjustment period while everything finishes getting moved in and we finish unpacking. Since we have a full basement I am hoping most of the boxes can go in the basement and then that way we don’t feel like all of the new house is in chaos as we unpack one box at a time and put things away.

I am also deluding myself that this will mean that I will be able to sort and put away the diaspora that has happened after living 4 years in this house and that I will be able to put like with like more easily. That and 12 closets should help a lot 🙂

Yesterday morning I started nodding off while waiting for my computer to do a massive update. I had already gone on a 2 mile walk in the brisk morning air but I was more than ready to shut my eyes for a little while. This may be because my coping mechanism in times of stress is to sleep as much as I can when I can’t do anything else. Or it could just be I am a mother of four children one of which moves into our bedroom every night which is bound to be disturbing my sleep on some level.

However my kids kept coming to talk to me about this that or the other thing so finally I had to give up on the whole being able to doze any more. I envy old people who can just drift off and then wake back up again, over and over, as a mother that sounds like a luxurious vacation to me.

To just have a day of dozing. I don’t think it will happen in the next decade, because heaven forbid my kids manage to feed themselves for a few hours, but it is nice to dream about, and hope for.

Of course by that time my sleep will have been disrupted for so long I won’t actually know what it looks like to have a normal sleep pattern again. And that will be that.

But maybe I should just try and sneak in a bit more sleep in this time of stress. I often feel like that adage of sleep when the baby sleeps, while helpful and unhelpful (because occasionally you want to have a few waking moments without the baby) should be true even when your babies are long and full of elbows and knees and no longer babies. You should sleep when they sleep.

We should declare days off to just be lie in your bed and doze days, you can read a book or color in your coloring book but let your dad and I get some sleep. We do carve out mornings and afternoons like this. It usually only happens because we threaten to be having sex, which is true sometimes but more often than not we are simply catching up on sleep, because that is actually what we need more sometimes.

But seriously why the fuck won’t kids just go to sleep?