The Bedtime Battle

There has been an ongoing battle in our house for well over two years now. It's a battle that I have thought I've won many times over, only to realize I was wrong. Dead wrong.

As I've blogged before, my son was born with a cleft palate. He had the corrective surgery at 18 months old. I will never forget that day as long as I live. November 20, 2006. The sights and sounds of that day are etched in my mind forever. When my son came out of surgery and we were walking back to the recovery room to meet him, I was prepared for him to look awful. To have a swollen face, possibly a bloody/bruised mouth - I was prepared visually. I was not prepared for the emotional aspect. When we walked into his recovery room, he was in a metal hospital crib. He was standing up, wailing. SCREAMING. FRANTIC. He looked like a little monkey trying any way he could to climb out of a zoo cage. My heart shattered into a million pieces right there on the floor. I held him and cried with him for the entire three hours we sat in the recovery room.

When we were taken upstairs to the peds floor, he refused to lay in his crib. I held him in my arms and we slept in a recliner the entire hospital stay. He wanted nothing to do with the crib. I hoped and prayed that he would be alright once we got him home.

After a day and a half in the hospital, we were home. He was on pain medicine, so he was pretty out of it. He did sleep in his crib for four nights. Once we started weaning him off the pain meds, we noticed he would freak out more and more when going to bed or down for a nap. It was plain as day what was going on - he woke up from surgery without anyone familiar around, in a strange crib, in an even stranger room. Now he refused any crib. He wouldn't sleep alone.

It got to the point that we would have to lay in his room, on the floor with our hands in the slats of the crib so he could be touching us. He refused to sleep any other way.

After a few months, it got pretty old. He wasn't sleeping well at all. Needless to say, neither were we. So we decided that since it was obvious that the crib was the problem, we would convert his crib into the toddler bed stage. That worked for all of one night. Then we were back to having to lay with him to go to sleep.

Then we thought, maybe it's because it's still a "crib." So we went out and bought a toddler bed. Same thing. ONE NIGHT. We would have to lay with him to get him to go to sleep. He would be up multiple times a night, before we even went to bed. After a while, instead of trying to fight him to go back to bed in the middle of the night, we let him get in bed with us. He was still our only child, and we figured if we all were getting a good night's sleep, what was the harm? He was obviously upset from the surgery, and still healing. I didn't have the heart to put him through it.

Months and months went by, and we went from going to bed in his bed, and moving to ours in the middle of the night to flat out refusing his bed. He was 100% co-sleeping with us, including nap time. He wouldn't go to bed unless someone was laying with him, and nap time was the same. I honestly have no idea how we managed to have a second child. He was honestly in our bed THAT often.

Fast forward to about two months ago. We knew we were going to be looking at buying a house very soon. We started talking to our now three and a half year old about what kind of room decor he'd want in his new house. He always answered with the obvious "A John Deere room MOMMY!" So we would hype him up, talking about the paint colors, and the wall stickers and pictures we would get for his room. We would get excited about hanging his John Deere metal signs. He would tell anyone who would listen about his new John Deere room. We thought we had it in the bag.

We moved in about three weeks ago. We hung the signs, put his John Deere blanket on his new twin bed. A week went by, and bedtime was running smoothly. We'd give kisses, and climb into bed. Two or three stories were read, lights stayed on and he'd go to sleep. It was pure bliss to have only my husband and I in our OWN bed.

Until now. As I'm typing this, I can see my son laying in MY bed. Asleep. Because he can see me from the doorway. He will be four in less than two months. And the battle is hardly over.