Sleep!

As always, our big problem is still sleep, one way or another.  Poor Limelet is chronically sleep-deprived (as am I, of course).  

On weekends he has a decent bedtime (for him) of around 9pm.  This is because his natural nap time is from about 11-1.  But on weekdays, the day care center's nap time for every child in the place is 1-3pm.  This is really bad, because Limelet can absolutely not go to sleep at bedtime before approximately 7.5 - 8 hours after he wakes up from his nap.  Of course we thought about having them put him down earlier, but they can't really do that in a room with 10 kids all doing the same thing all at once.  The tots don't even get their little lunches until noon.  The best we have been able to do is to ask them to get him up by 2pm.  

I have a suspicion that they sort of let this 2pm time slide later and later at times, because of how hard it's been getting to get him to sleep even by 9:30.  Last night he didn't go to sleep until 11:30, and this week it's generally been 10 or 10:30.  If you go to the center between 1 and 3, all the rooms are dark and full of sleeping kids, and it's the time that the workers get their breaks.  So I imagine it's ind of hard (mentally speaking) for them to get just one kid up at 2 while all the others are still sleeping and the room is dark.

So, bedtimes are kinda hard for us at home. We have repeatedly tried the thing where you catch the earlier sleepy cycle time of 7:30 or so, which theoretically is his proper bedtime.  However, the result has invariably been that his body takes it as a nap, he sleeps for exactly 40 minutes, then wakes refreshed and bouncy to stay awake until midnight or so.  (Believe me, we have tried everything to keep him asleep at the earlier time.)

In looking at the night weaning materials, I saw one mother's account of why she decided to night wean.  It was something along the lines of, "our only time alone together is evenings, and we got tired of being interrupted every two hours to put him back to sleep."  So, what she's saying is, she and her husband actually regularly had TWO HOURS together before their kid woke up.  And I'm guessing that if they had two hours to spend, it wasn't 9:30 to 11:30, or 10 to midnight, as it would be if she had our kid, or she would have said something about the lateness.  They probably had something like 8 until 10 alone together. (Maybe that's just my fantasy, but that seems pretty common).

And so--what the heck are they complaining about?! That would be unbelievably great!  We would LOVE to have "only" two hours alone together one evening, any evening!  Or day, for that matter.

Well, anyway.  Night weaning is coming up this weekend.  I anticipate complete sleeplessness and lots of crying and emotional trauma the first several nights, by all accounts.  However, since we are prepared for it, we hope to help each other remain patient and calm in the face of all that.  We aren't making any plans for the weekend; I'm even trying to get the grocery shopping done Friday evening because I'm going to be knackered Saturday morning.

Naturally, Limelet tosses and turns all night, but right after 6am he begins sleeping like the proverbial log and is bloody hard to wake, even at 7.