Sleeping like a baby

Have you ever wondered where this phrase came from?  Certainly not from my house.  To put it simply:  my babies don't sleep!!!  If you "sleep like a baby" in this family then you are extremely sleep-deprived! 

If you are a parent of children who are not good sleepers then you can relate.  You always hear about OTHER kids who sleep through the night from the time they are little bitty babies or the kids who have to be woken up for school and sleep until ten o'clock on weekends.  If you're on my side of the coin, then you are just hoping and praying that your kids will turn into normal teenagers and actually want to sleep past sunrise eventually!

Neither one of my kids slept through the night until they were well over a year old.  Even now my almost-five-year-old will get me up at least once during the night.  She's cold.  She needs ice in her water.  She's scared.  She can't find her stuffed jaguar.  She heard a noise.  You name it, she'll make up the excuse.  And sleeping in?  Forget it.  "Sleeping in" around here means you don't get up before 7am!

I have been a mom for over nine years and for over nine years I have continually wondered why my children seem to need less sleep than other people's children.  I've often wondered why my children seem to need less sleep than me!  I inherited a lot of things from my mom, but the one thing she didn't give me was a love of early mornings.  She's the type of person who wakes up at 5am before her alarm goes off.  And she'll actually get up instead of groaning that it can't possibly be time already.  My children definitely take after their Grammie in that respect.  It doesn't matter what time they go to bed... it could be 8pm or midnight, but they will still be up by seven. 

Have you ever noticed that your kids need even less sleep when you need more sleep?    Or that when they do decide to sleep it is not when you want them to?  The mornings that we have to be somewhere early is when K will decide to sleep, and waking her up is NOT pretty.  It really starts the day on a sour note if she is not allowed to wake up on her own.  That's going to make for some interesting mornings when she starts kindergarten next year!  There are some mornings after J goes to school that I would love to go back to bed.  Sometimes I do.  It never fails, though, that those are the days K will wake up a few minutes later.  The occasional days she actually will stay in bed past 8:00 are the days that I stay up. 

Yesterday K fell asleep on her daddy's lap around 4pm.  I'm guessing she is coming down with something because a) she never naps and b) this was the second day in a row that happened.  Anyway, she conked out for the rest of the afternoon/evening.  I finally carried her to bed around 8pm and she never even flinched.  I knew, though, that it was too much to hope for that she'd actually be down for the count.  Sure enough, just as we were getting J ready for bed at 9pm, here comes K out of her room. 

I am a night owl and don't mind staying up late.  In fact, I often do, because it's the only time I get "me" time - to read, to watch something on tv that I want to watch, to chat on Facebook, etc.  I do make myself go to bed at a decent hour on (most) weeknights, though, because getting up at 6am is brutal otherwise.   I knew K wasn't going back to sleep anytime soon so I put in a DVD for her and read my book until 11pm.  We kept all of the lights off and I will sheepishly admit to helping her along a little bit with some sleep-inducing allergy medicine.  Surprisingly I never heard a peep out of her after putting her back in her bed and she slept until 7:15 this morning.

So while hubby and I were not blessed with good sleepers, every now and then, like yesterday, we are offered a glimpse of what "sleeping like a baby" is like!