I don't know if this is true for all families and all children, all I have is a n of 1; but before I had a child I had no idea just how much of an issue sleep would be. Of course I had been warned of the early sleep deprivation and getting the babe to sleep issues... I may not have been ready for that but I was certainly warned. What I had no advance notice of was the sleep issues that plague an almost three year old, aka the sneaky sleep scarcity.
Sneaky sleep scarcity is the condition where a toddler deprives herself of much needed sleep because she insists on sneaking out of her bed and causing varying degrees of destruction. This condition settled into our house about a month ago. Like many other afflictions it started out mild. We would put Evie to bed and hear her rustling around in her room for about 15 minutes before she would fall asleep in her bed. Then it escalated to us opening the door to her side of the house and finding her asleep on the floor in the hallway. A few days later she had made it out of her room, beyond the hallway and into our bed. Each time we chuckled a bit and then just put her back into her room, not wanting to interfere in what seemed like a pretty innocuous little expression of independence. Of course all along the amount of time between me saying good night and her actually going night night got longer and longer. (and concurrently those afternoon naps went from a predictable 2 hours to more like 3 or 4 hours)
Any sense of innocence ended this week. It was Tuesday night, Evie was put to bed around 8 pm and proceeded to putter around as was her new habit. About a 1/2 hour later Patrick and I were on the other side of the house watching TV when mentioned that it sounded like the water was running, Patrick dismissed it saying "Oh it is probably just the sound of gas from the heater" Just to be sure I thought I'd go check on Evie. I opened the door to that side of the house and was greeted by a big puddle of water and the sound of the water in the sink running full blast. The sink is a little clogged right now, so it must have quickly overflowed and then proceeded to start to flood the bathroom and into the hallway and our bedroom. I found Evie in her bedroom on the edge of her bed, crying. She explained that she turned it on and couldn't turn it off and tried to tell us but we didn't hear her. We all cleaned up the mess and she went off to bed (at this point it was like 10:30 pm). After this first incident we thought maybe we should rethink this nighttime routine...
The next night we put Evie into bed and left the door open so I could more easily monitor her. I saw her sneak into our room and decided to let it slide... that really wasn't the problem (or so I thought). An hour or so later we came in to go to bed and found her asleep in our bed with what was left of our deodorant in her hand. The rest of in was in chunks on the bed and smeared all over the lamp on Patrick's side of the bed. Apparently even sneaking into our room was a recipe for undesirable bedtime behavior.
That night was the proverbial straw on the camel's back, which forced us into action. (This seems to be a reoccurring theme for us, our parenting style seems to be one of never learn our lesson on the first go around... sigh) For the past three nights Evie has been confined to her room at night and all is well again. The funny thing about all of this is all we have had to do is to ask her to promise to stay in her room, and she has. Guess we could have taken care of that problem earlier, eh?
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