I would link to a post that explains just how terrible Alexis is and always has been at sleeping, but that would require linking to approximately half of the posts I've written in the past five years. TOO MANY CHOICES. SO MANY EXAMPLES. SO LITTLE SLEEP.
Long of the short, I'd like to punch every so-called "Sleep Expert" in the mommy/daddy buttons and then lock them in a house with Alexis for four days. She would DESTROY them and their hare-brained sleep training theories. The fact of the matter is that the kid just plain needs less sleep than most humans. She DEFINITELY needs less sleep than I do. She has used that fact to systematically destroy me every night for the entirety of her life.
Accepting my fate has led to a sort of freedom. Truly. I accept that there is no hope that she will ever sleep past 6:30, she meets those expectations, and we're all better off not going to battle over it. My one parenting regret is that I didn't figure it out when she was six months old. There are a few million battles we could have skipped if I had realized I was doomed to fail, y'know?
Recently I have even managed to find an upside to the whole thing. While parents far and wide are battling with their kids to get up early enough for school, I'm all, "HAHAHAHA! She could sleep in 20 minutes and STILL be on time for the bus!"
NEVER ACCEPT YOUR FATE. NEVER LAUGH IN THE FACE OF OTHER STRUGGLING PARENTS.
I don't know exactly why it has happened, but I know it started the night we moved Alexis' old toddler bed to the playroom. We're painting the spare bedroom where it was stashed (some posts about that painting project are coming, don't you worry), so we had to evict all of the furniture that I was hiding up there. There was space in her playroom, so blah, blah, blah, the bed was in there and she thought that it was SUPER! DUPER! FUN! that it was in there and somehow she curled up in that bed and fell asleep right in the middle of playing with a bunch of dolls.
I left her there. I'm not dumb enough to move a sleeping kid when that sleeping kid happens to be sleeping in a bed.
The next morning, Alexis slept late. Like, really late.
The next night, she moved back to her room (SUPER! DUPER! FUN! is no substitution for being surrounded by Christmas lights and stuffed animals like she is in her own bedroom). She slept late again.
And the next morning.
And the next morning.
She's on a solid week of sleeping past 6:30. In fact, this morning she slept until 9:15.
I would be ECSTATIC about this fact, but DOUBLE-YOU-TEE-EFF? She starts school on Thursday. Her bus will be at our front door at 7:25. Things are going to be very, very ugly when I have no choice but to interrupt that whole sleeping in thing that I have so desperately wanted for the past five years.
I need a nap just thinking about how ugly it's going to get.
