Wednesday, June 4, 2014

I'll Just Make Myself Comfortable

With all the germs and post-nasal drip cough around here, it has lead to some pretty interesting night time routines. Derek is also in the process of night time potty training (i.e. waking us at 3am to potty) but then needing a human sized lovey to get back to bed. Admittedly, we have not been very good enforcers of the bedtime routine in Dek's early days since we were more go-with-the-flow types who didn't want to necessarily pass up dinner invitations or a late night out when we knew Derek was good natured enough to go along with the flow. However, Q has been a game-changer, since the level of exhaustion/illness has risen above our desire to be normal humans and have a life after hours.

Our evenings/nights usually look like this:
6:30pm Dinner
7:00pm Bath
7:30pm Bed for Dek. Which is usually followed by a short, but consistent negotiation of bedtime stories and who will do the final tuck in. We give Derek a "card" that he can use to call for us once. We started with five cards a few months ago and now that we're down to the one, its a good compromise. After that he'll usually stay in bed unless...
8:30pm Q usually falls asleep on her own after nursing.
9:00pm Dek sometimes has to pee one last time if he is awake.
12:30am Q is up to nurse (sometimes she will sleep through this feeding)
3:00am-ish Q is up to nurse again but goes back to bed.
3:10am Inevitably Dek will wake up if he hears baby. Gets a sip of water since the nighttime coughing has been bad with the cold. Mike will need to take him to pee and they both end up in the guest room.
5:00am Derek is now lying sideways and Mike moves back to the normal bed.
6:00am Q is up to nurse and up for a few hours.
6:30am Dek wakes to pee and usually for the day.

Believe it or not, I can usually get some rest. If I go right to bed around 9am and Q sleeps until 3am - that's a solid 6 hours which I barely got when I didn't have kids, so that's the jackpot. Even a sleep stretch of 3 hours is really decent. Dek was such a restless baby that he would usually wake in 1-2 hour increments, so this is (sadly) not too bad.

The bigger challenge sharing a bed with Dek is he inevitably starts to do a rotation until he's completely horizontal and then you're pushed out of the bed. Then when he wakes up, its like, where did you go?

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