Night Terror

I'm still consider sharing our story, the one I told you I was considering sharing last friday, but for today I'm going to blog about Babydoll's less than wonderful nights lately.

Babydoll has not been behaving well, at all, at bed time. Supernanny has taught me how to get children to go to bed at night, but I haven't yet found the answer to a three-year-old who shares a room with her big sister and refuses to leave her sister alone and go to sleep every night. 

We put her to bed, she goes happily.  When we put Sweet Pea to bed an hour later Babydoll decides it's party time.  She talks to SP, talks to herself, sings, reads books, does puzzles, gets out of bed, "accidently" climbs up the bunkbed ladder into her sister's bed.  We struggle, SP cries because she wants to sleep, BD cries because she doesn't.  We've started putting happy faces on the calendar for the nights when she stays in bed and stays relatively quiet so that she and her sister can get enough sleep.  She knows when she gets 7 happy faces (not necesarily in a row) she'll get to do something fun with Nana. So far in the last week she's had 2 happy faces, which means 5 nights in the last week I wanted to pull my hair out. 

BD is tired at bedtime, and even if she's not, it's bedtime and she's going to bed.  Tonight we tried something else.  I put Sweet Pea to bed in our bed to wait for BD to fall asleep.  Without her little party buddy in there Babydoll did fall asleep pretty quickly, and then I moved SP back to her bed.  It is now 9:30 and quiet in the girls' room.   It worked for tonight, we'll see about tomorrow, but it can't be a perminent solution because I don't want SP to have to wake up everynight in order to go to bed.  If this continues to work, it'll just be long enough for BD to get used to falling asleep right away (since she will not be expecting her sister to be coming in an hour later, and staying up for her).  Hopefully once she learns how to fall asleep right away and not stay up for SP, we'll be able to go back to putting SP to bed in her bed without BD waking up to start the party.  Under no circumstances will either child be sleeping with us, just in our bed on a temporary basis, and just for an hour or less.

I just remembered that I was going to blog about Babydoll's rough patch (yes she is our "free spirit") and what I did and how it helped.  Perhaps tomorrow, because this post is getting long, and I need some water, and a glass of wine, and a massage, and a vacation, and a magic wand...