About 3 a.m. on many nights I hear my 13-year-old son Alex (PDD-NOS) chortling and talking in his bedroom or in the living room, sometimes even singing. In my bed, I lift my heavy head and crane over my wife Jill to see if there’s a bar of bright yellow shining under our bedroom door. Many nights, there is.
Alex got up in the night a lot when he was younger, and for a sleepless while Jill and I split what we termed “Night Duty.” Who would get up in the middle of the night for Alex and who would get up early in the morning for Alex? We switched. (You do it! … I did it last night! God you just always forget – you are so SELFISH!)
Night duty seems to be back. Several times Alex has woken Ned up by rocking in bed, making the whole Ikea structure creak and weakening the joints held together with little more than a twist of the Allen Wrench. The rocking – back and forth, back and forth, creak creak creak! – is a motion that I’m coming to suspect springs from an urge of Alex’s that I don’t want to talk about yet. For a long stretch of the Night Duty phase, I admit that we left Alex on his own in the living room in the middle of the night. Then last summer he started leaving the apartment, and now I can’t think of sleeping when that ribbon shines under our bedroom door.
“We all almost wake up many times a night,” says Jill cousin, a doctor. There is, I must think, some doorstop missing from Alex’s brain that allows the flow of being awake to pop open his eyes. Either that or something is missing in his brain that should make him care that everyone else is asleep.
I wake up around 3 and find Alex on the couch, munching pretzels. Pretzel breath at 3 a.m. …
“Alex, go back to bed!” He does, darting into the shadows. “Head down, Alex!” I see it go down in the dark. I head to the bathroom to take one of my middle-age 10-minute pisses and then weave back to back past the shadows of the dining room table and chairs toward the bedroom. He always pulls this crap around 4:30. By the time I wrestle him to bed and convince him to stop rocking and by the time I can wiggle my toes down there in my own sheets and drown my own thoughts with exhaustion, it’s 0600 and time for the alarm.
Then one night at 4:30, for some reason, it hit me. “Alex, do you want to get up now?”
He laughed and laughed and laughed we I tugged him to the bathroom. His laughter evaporated when I clicked on the light. “Alex, we’re getting up now. You want to be up, we’re up!”
“Back to bed!” said Alex.
“No, Alex, you’re up now…”
“Back to bed!”
“Fine,” I told him. “Fine. Go back to bed or we’re getting up!”
Down went his head. I returned to bed. I listened and listened as 0600 neared. I didn’t get back to sleep.
Comments
baseball dad
I go through the same thing, except we don’t do the switch. My son gets up everyday at 4:30 to go poop but being a sensory fella he hasn’t figured this out so I clean out his diaper, put him in his undies and he is up for good. He will play in his room, games, legos, read books but he only sleeps 7 hours a night and takes no nap. I work in major league baseball so I don’t get to sleep till about 11pm every night when team is in town, so by the end of a ten game homestand im so tired I can barely see straight. If I try to encourage him to go back to sleep we get the loud tantrum that wakes up the neighborhood and mom. So I usually just collapse on his bed while he does his thing..I don’t sleep, I just don’t play either. I keep hoping this will get better, but it never does. Either he will someday figure this out or I’ll die of exhaustion by driving off the road someday in a daze
Renee
This post comes after a several weeks of this with my 3 1/2 year old son. I have a 5 month old who is supposed to be sharing his room, but instead, he is still snoozing in a bassinet by my bed every night because I can’t risk the chance of either of them waking the other up, since they both still wake on their own at different times as it is. There is no sleeping for my husband and I going on in my house right now, and after reading your post, I’m wondering if it will ever get better. (Not to mention the fact that I have a third child who is 18 months old….it’s nuts around here.) I would love you to read my post from my blog….I JUST posted on this topic a week or so ago. I’m sure you could relate. Thanks for sharing. My blog on this topic is http://reneebcser.blogspot.com/2012/06/on-sleepingor-lack-thereof.html
Good luck to you, and I hope you get some sleep soon!
Jenny from the Block
So sorry. My son woke 6-8 times a night for over a year. Just now, he is waking only once a night (sometimes 3, just depends, he never is too consistent). It was so hard that first year, and I am always scared that it will go back b/c you never know. I hope in time it does get better for you all. Eventually, they will grow big enough to be up without waking the rest of us!
Lisa the wellness coach
Did you think about trying a safe supplement? Believe it or not, my daughter sometimes gets up and tells me she can’t sleep and I give her an isotonic calcium supplement. Since it’s a powder that you mix with water it’s absorbed immediately. It tastes like juice and once she takes it she’s back to sleep in no time. I take it before bed and sleep all night long. It’s safe, okay for kids as well as adults and who doesn’t need more calcium? If that doesn’t work, there are other safe alternatives as well.
Beverly
My son is turning 5 yes. Old in Dec. As of now we still have him in our room, in his car toddler bed. He still has a Gtube in his belly, not using it at this time.. Since he’s been eating. The past 3 nights he has been waking up around 3am. And lays in his bed laughing…so I all him if he wants to get in bed with me and he comes over to my side of the bed and I help him up… (husband works nights) I turn on my little TV we have putting on baby 1St TV… He lays there and never hours back to sleep. Since he woke up laughing and very silly I know I’m doomed… He’s not going back to sleep.. I put him to bed each night around 8:30~9:00 pm.. He does not take naps… So each morning around 8:00am, he’s trying to then lay down on the couch and it’s a fight to keep him up, since he has preschool in a couple hours.. This morning my husband being home last night said he’d get up at 5:45am to make sure our H.S. 14 yr old, was up and getting ready for school.. Not even 15 mins. Go by and my son, was laughing so I get up and not before I’m half way to his bed, he’s sleeping!!!!! So I stay up,lol… He has SPD, does not talk, ex, for 10 words….when he wants to and self stims like mad…flapping,jumping,spinning, toe walking.. We do have a SPD diet set up from his OT..plus we brush him..
Now, I’m kinda mad since it’s 7:30am and he’s still sleeping and my husband went back to bed after or daughter got picked up for school… Someone had said it could be due to developmental stages..
Beverly
*sorry for the areas that don’t make sense, this darn Swype*