Sleepless Night 2 – Doze Hard

[If you haven’t read Sleepless Night this post will make more sense if you read that one first]

Cardinal rules normally earn that status for very, very good reasons. I broke one on Tuesday night so I paid dearly for it on Wednesday.

Monkey Boy obviously enjoyed his spell in our bed so much that he was keen to repeat it. It certainly wasn’t down to Fat Chops snoring last night. He was sleeping like a… well, he was very peaceful. Monkey Boy didn’t settle well in the first place but at about 2am he started to let us know that the relays were starting early tonight. We played it by the book more or less. When we went in, we didn’t talk to him and didn’t cuddle him, we just lay him down and left the room. Ideally, we would have left him to cry it out but that’s a really tricky one when you have twins sharing a room. Why should we let him upset Fat Chops? We persevered and after about 20 minutes or so [we were both bleary eyed by this stage so it could have been an hour for all I know, I’m pretty sure that I was as close to sleep walking as I ever have been] he settled and we drifted off.

It turns out that we had only succeeded in thwarting the first attempt. I have mentioned before how persistent Monkey Boy is and at about 4am he had another go. I wasn’t really functioning that well but Hannah was slightly more lucid and suggested that we take another tack. We set up a travel cot in the box room and put him in that and closed the door leaving him to cry it out. He didn’t like that one bit! It is not at all pleasant hearing your son scream so loud that the windows rattled but we tried our best to ignore it reminding ourselves that we need to break the habit now to avoid a horrible future of a seven year old sleeping between us and wetting our bed.

The tantrum went on for almost ten minutes and he ticked all the boxes; howling, screaming, thumping the wall. As I was reaching for my iPod to drown out the din, it finally started to abate. That’s when we heard a loud thump. Myself and Hannah sat bolt upright and did a Looney Toons style double take. Before we had time to go and check we heard the door handle creaking. I know I wasn’t thinking clearly at that stage but I laugh now when I look back at my thought process. Did we have someone staying with us that I forgot about? Was it a burglar? Was it a ghost? Unfortunately, as Sherlock Holmes famously said, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. The truth was, that despite being barely able to see over the top of the travel cot, my resourceful son had managed to scale it. We opened our bedroom door and there was our little mountaineer. He managed to look quite pleased with himself despite standing there in an ill fitting sleep-suit, red-eyed with tears and snot running down his face.

When I last left him, he was trying to reach up with his leg but I was confident that he was still a couple of inches short. I would have loved to see how he managed it and am very curious as to what part of his body he landed on. Head and hands are the joint favourites, feet first is an outside bet!

We were tired, we were confused and we were clean out of ideas on what to do with him so we took him into our bed again and I hugged him tight enough to make it clear that even though he had completely outwitted us, we were taking consolation in the fact that there would be no wriggling around tonight. I will be lowering the base of his cot tonight [Hannah won’t allow me put barbed wire around the top of it] and moving it to the box room until we break this habit.

This morning I have been wondering about the nickname that I chose for my first born. He was dubbed Monkey Boy because he had a cheeky glint in his eye from the day he was born. Has he taken the moniker as a challenge? A title that he has to earn by his exploits? It might not be the case but the title certainly suits him!