Tuesday, May 09, 2006

You'll come get me in an hour mama?



Bobo has never been a great sleeper, you know when you bring them home from the hospital that they won't sleep for a leisurely 8-10 hours but you hope that it won't be too terribly long until they give you a decent nights worth of sleep. I wasn't a first time mom so I knew that at least the first few months were going to be hard but... This child resisted sleep every step of the way. The first year of her life this girl got by on less sleep than I would think is humanly possible, I don't remember exactly how old she was but I clearly remember her slapping her little cheeks to keep herself awake. I couldn't believe it, I had never seen anything like it just how much could someone despise sleep. Which by the way I LOVE, I mean really I love love love to sleep, so clearly this little girl and I were going to have issues. Now that Bobo has grown a bit she seems to go through "sleep cycles" she will sleep like a angel for a few weeks until the devil takes her place and she will wake repeatedly or fight nap time and bedtime with determination that could break the best of us. At one point she was going to bed then right as I was drifting of to sleep around midnight I would hear her. I would lay in bed and try to convince myself that tonight would be different, that if I just ignored her she would settle back down. But that just didn't happen and so we would begin our nighttime ritual, from about 12:30 /1:00 a.m until about 4:00 a.m every night I would repeatedly put Bobo back to bed. I would let her cry but then I would start to panic I did not need two of them awake. So back to her room I would go, this routine got old really fast so in desperation one early morning (2:00 a.m) I brought her downstairs put on the lion king DVD and laid down on the couch. Now why would I think that someone as sleep deprived as I was would maybe possibly fall asleep, no I won't, I wouldn't do that. Well I woke up when I heard Nick say HONEY! I look down and on the hard wood floor her body half wedged under the couch was my little Bobo, finally exhausted. Now Bobo is by no means a great sleeper but I seem to have found a magical combination of words that has changed everything in regards to her sleep patterns. Now I am not sure if I should write this down, I may upset the God's of sleep, but the words are "I will come get you in an hour". This works at nap time and bed time as she has no real concept of time. She now asks me every time I put her into her bed "you come get me in a hour mama? For now this is working like a charm, except for the fact that big sister who is much more wise in the ways of time and keeps trying to explain to her at bedtime that I will in fact not be back in an hour, shaking her head at how silly her baby sister is as she talks.

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