And tonight we get a reminder of why it’s often not the travel that gets you, it’s how the disruption in routine completely ruins sleep patterns for days after you get home.
6:30PM – J-Man is face down on the couch, so Mary brings him up a half-hour early for bath time.
7:00 – After a less-than-ideal, but tolerable, bedtime routine, J-Man passes out in the rocking chair. Mary puts him to bed.
8:24 – Tim has gotten some work done and thinks, I really should go get some dinner finally. This marks the culmination of Tim’s biggest mistake of the evening.
8:25 – J-Man wakes up crying and then screaming.
8:28 – Tim asks Mary to throw a bowl of soup in the microwave and to relieve him in 10 minutes.
8:38 – No chance in hell of sleep happening. J-Man gets mad if Tim leaves room.
8:55 – With still no idea why he won’t sleep and just remains upset, Mommy and Daddy come down to offer him some food or drink in case he really needs them. Refuses both. Tim reheats soup. Mary and J-Man try to rest on couch.
9:05 – Everyone goes upstairs; Mary rocks J-Man; Tim goes back down and reheats soup again.
9:12 – Mary yells down for Tim to get stuff to give J-Man some ibuprofen since no one has a clue what’s wrong. Tim abandons remainder of soup.
9:25 – Clearly nothing is working, so we go to Mommy and Daddy’s bed. J-Man sort of calms down, but keeps tossing and turning. If he wedged himself any farther into Daddy, they’d be conjoined. Mary falls asleep. Tim’s arms fall asleep but the rest of him does not.
10:00 – J-Man seems calm and groggy. Carry him to his room, rock him a while, put him down, whimpers a bit, and finally seems to go to sleep. Tim gives up on soup entirely, makes popcorn, and he and Mary watch the last half of some stupid thing on TV about Barrow, Alaska having really bad weather.
10:30 – Give up on the evening.
Yippee… Guess we should be thankful, though. It used to be much, much, much worse.
Posts that hopefully are similar:
- Such a thing as too much attention…
- Getting Off My Own Routine
- As If We Forgot That We Don’t Travel Well
- Everything I Know About Traveling With An Autistic Toddler
- What’s Your Autistic Toddler Like Now? (Part 3)
- Are You Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?
- Climbing Out
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Oh God I could’ve written that post. Especially got a kick out of the Barrow Alaska show. Yeah, I watched it too…must’ve been a bad TV night if we were watching Jim Cantori in Alaska.
Jim has an unnatural and intense interest in being dumped in the middle of the worst weather imaginable. I knew someone who used to work at The Weather Channel and said he was every bit as intense and quirky as he is on TV.
I bet he’s got some sensory-seeking genes in him for sure!