perchance to dream
Minor complaint: my kids recently forgot how to sleep and it's ruining my life.
Neither of them has ever been a champion sleeper, though Ilya has always been better at sleeping and everything related to "self-regulation" than Raffi. Until recently, he was content to sleep in a crib. Then he began exploring the possibility of sleeping in the bottom bunk of the bunk bed, and soon he was no longer willing to sleep in the crib. The crib is still in the kids' bedroom, filled with stuffed animals, awaiting the day when we finally decide to do something about it. Now that Ilya can get out of bed at night, he does. He gets in our bed at 2am because he "had a nightmeo." Why would he not? Our bed is bigger than his, and has us in it. Unfortunately, some nights, it also has Raffi in it, and even if there was room for all of us in the bed, there is never enough room for Raffi and Ilya to share any space of any size. They hit each other and wake each other up, jockeying for the warm spots closest to us, and we wake up (we were barely sleeping anyway) and one of us, feeling full of martyred bad feeling, carries one of the kids back to his own bed, then stays in the kids' bedroom (sometimes, in the kid's bed) til the kid is asleep, because our kids don't know how to fall asleep without our physical presence. This is because, despite having agonized over sleep training, we are failures at the one essential thing we were supposed to do when they were babies, which is teach them how to fall asleep unaided. Now we are paying the price.
This situation has followed the pattern of all sleep problems, which is that it starts out barely noticeable, then shifts to annoying-but-tolerable, and then incrementally, too gradually to notice what's happening or do anything about it, it becomes so intolerable that we are all on the verge of nervous collapse. But by then it's too late to do anything about it except radically change our entire lives.
So the plan, as of now, is to transform our bedroom into one giant mattress. The floor will be made of mattress, and also the walls. We'll have to make some sacrifices in order to accomplish this -- the mattress-room, we think, should probably be located in a house in a creepy town in the bad part of Upstate, and all our money for the forseeable future will go to the mattress-conversion of the rest of the property. But it will be worth it, because we will all finally get some rest.
As fun as that sounds, it actually wouldn't solve anything, because Ilya and Raffi would still be sleep-punching each other over their preferred corners of the mattress-room. So we have to do the next best thing, which is to move to an apartment where our kids can each have their own bedrooms. Lol, sorry, are you insane? A three bedroom apartment in Brooklyn where one of the bedrooms isn't a railroaded walk-in closet or windowless drywall-enclosure that ruins what would otherwise be a normal-sized living room? Do you think we're billionaires????
Ok, so what we are actually going to do is, we're going to put the kids to bed, in their own beds, and then we are going to lock our bedroom door. When one of the kids wakes up and discovers that the door is locked, he will scream and cry outside the door until the other one wakes up too. Then they will both scream and cry, for possibly hours. This will flense our brains of their last remaining shreds of sanity until one of us, feeling martyred and divorcey, will go into the kids' room and sit with them til they fall back asleep, no matter how long it takes (possibly til the next morning), sacrificing any potential for productivity for the following day.
Then we'll do it again the next day, and the next day, and the day after that. We will say, we will open the door in the morning and you can come cuddle with us then, but at night we all need to sleep. When we don't sleep in our own beds no one gets to sleep very well. Your body needs sleep to grow and be healthy. Our bodies need sleep so that our brains can digest our experiences into rich loam in which the seeds of our ideas can sprout, flower, and eventually grow into writing projects lucrative enough to pay for our family's food, rent, health insurance premiums and your glockenspiel lessons. Without sleep, none of this is possible! Also, if you spend the entire night in your own bed, we will let you eat Mallomars for breakfast.