Sleeping Beauty

Lauren isn't getting enough Mommy time, for whatever reason. She's exceedingly clingy, particularly at night, and has developed the fun trick of getting up at 4 or 5 a.m., coming into mom's room and wedging herself between her parents. I personally don't give a whit...she's generally cold, and in my opinion, she snugs in bed and falls back asleep as fast as I do. Doug takes a more grim view of the situation.

In fact, to hear him tell the tale, Lauren comes in and throws flaming torches on the bed, wreaking havoc and destruction. She then spends the next four to five hours in mild distraction, somehow shoving a grown man out of bed and causing him to cease sleeping entirely. When the toddler wakes up in the middle of the night, it's Daddy's incessant whining and crabiness the next day that I can't stand.

So, in an effort to give her a little more Mommy time, I decided to sleep with her on Friday night. Dad got out the inflatable mattress and we set it up on her bedroom floor. She was thrilled, and I was amazed that I could actually fall asleep at 10 p.m.

The only real downside was that (A) she figured I was her personal concierge, and that I'd be getting up all night to give her drink refills, and (B)...well, I'm not used to going to bed that early. After just six hours of sleep I woke up and stayed awake. I knew it would be suicidal to try and get up at 4 a.m., so I quietly stared up at the ceiling for another hour until I just couldn't take it anymore. I HAD to get up.

This didn't go over very well, and ended up with Lauren getting up several times and trying to come down to my office, where I was trying to get some work done. That didn't go over very well, either.

I think the net results was the discovery that sleep gotten in before midnight seems to be far more restful than that gotten after midnight, and that Lauren was far too excited to have Mom there to sleep deeply at any point. She was still in bed at 11 a.m. that morning, catching up from her excitement.