Sleep

Last night I spent a couple of hours at our neighborhood’s more-or-less-annual HOA meeting. Because this public forum for complaining about things in the neighborhood only comes once a year, that’s a lot of griping and moaning to cram into two hours. Surprisingly, there seemed to be quite a bit less of that this year - that or I’m just used to it. We live in a pretty subdued neighborhood, and generally I only get worked up when there are safety problems like people parking all over the place so kids can’t easily see traffic and vice-versa. There are always a small number of people who seem to have nothing else better to do than complain about every minor thing, but that’s how life is everywhere.

I ended up leaving early because it was getting late and the peak of productivity for that meeting - such as those things are - seemed to have long passed by that point. I had meant to be home by the time J-Man would be going to bed, but I misread my cell phone clock and left the meeting late. He had become too tired to stay up any longer, and Mary had already put him to bed so I missed our nighttime routine. This made me sad.

Apparently he had been pretty confused about why I wasn’t there, which also made me sad, though he handled it well. I also missed reading him his nighttime story and doing our little father-son ritual, which is really quite a liturgy of sorts if you think about it, and which also made me sad to miss. And I also missed him trying to read the words on Mommy’s shirt before he went to bed, which also also made me sad.

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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.

We’re back from our two-day trip to see family for Thanksgiving, and as usual, we’re all having our post-travel hangover. None of us travel well. Even the things in our house that don’t travel - our two cats - don’t do well when we travel. They generally get mad and pee on something while we’re gone.

I think people don’t appreciate the level of preparation that’s required to make traveling the least stressful experience possible for our kids. J-Man does much better than he used to with travel, but it still throws off his routine, pretty much nothing ‘works’ the same way, nothing is in a familiar place, and he definitely gets on average two or three less hours of sleep per night when we’re away from home.

Our sleep formula when we’re traveling? Completely exhaust him (which means keeping him up way past his normal bedtime) so he’ll crash and sleep in a strange bed. Whee…

While neither of us like to drive - to put it mildly, especially on four-hour car trips like this one - I think it’s at least as tiring, if not more so, to maintain near-constant awareness of how J-Man is doing and handling the day so we can adjust accordingly if we need to. I know we probably over-obsess about it, but putting forth that level of effort in general is why he’s doing so well these days and why traveling is less of a disaster than it used to be.

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[Ed. note - Today was so incredibly awesome that we both felt the need to write posts about it independently...]

For about a month now, the J-man has had an off-and-on cough. It would go away for a bit, then come back, usually with no real other symptoms. Sunday night though, that cough wouldn’t stop. He coughed pretty much all night. It meant he didn’t rest, and neither did we, because we could hear him.

We already run a humidifier in his room at night, and we had the Vicks “waterless” vaporizer going too.

Still… when he got up this morning, we immediately saw he wasn’t going to school. The cough was getting worse and starting to sound distinctly seal-barky.

Tim took the J-man to the doctor, who confirmed our thoughts that it was croup. Great. He’s had croup before, once when he was little-bitty, and once when he was a little less than 2. This time, it seems harder to get him to be calm, but excitement/movement makes him cough more.

There was a lot of Signing Time in the house today. That, and the theme music from The West Wing - when it plays, the J-man will stand stock-still and watch the TV intently. Or, he’ll climb up on the couch, settle in beside me for the duration of the theme song, and then be on his way.

He’s a smart kid. Knows good TV when he hears it!

So we now are running a humidifier downstairs, have cranked up the one in his room and are going to lower the house temperature tonight… all in the hopes that the coughing will stop. No school tomorrow anyway because of Veterans Day.

And… Happy Birthday to my dad. He was born on Veterans Day. He’s one of the best dads around!

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(Just kidding…. sort of…)

We’re going out of town for my grandmother’s 90th (!!!!!) birthday this weekend. She is - to put it mildly - a force of nature and such an important part of my life that I can’t even begin to put it into words. The good Lord would have to smite the highway off the map for us to miss that, but the length of the drive (7 hours one-way) is well outside even the outer limits of our traveling comfort zone. Also, two nights is usually our limit before the lack of routine and the exhaustion that builds up from him not sleeping in a not-familiar place blows us all up.

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The past three days have been a whirlwind. Yes he’s gone at school most of the day and supposedly that’s some sort of ‘free time’ people imagine I have now, but we’ve used that time to try to dig out of the bottomless pit of chaos that our lives had become through neglect while we attended to J-Man’s IEP process and all the life-craziness of the past month. Plus I’m trying to build up my freelance career again. Ack!

As we’ve said before, J-Man does not nap. If he naps once a month, it’s a miracle. Mary and I love sleep more than just about anything, even coffee and chocolate. This made us question J-Man’s genetics at one point, but we resolved that question by looking at other attributes he shares with one (my big ears) or both (the tendency to snort when laughing too hard) of us.

So his first week of school is done - in his case, a three-day starter week - and it has completely wiped him out. It’s an Everest-like leap to go from two, three-hour preschool days with the under-threes at his former school - even as fun and energetic as they are - to five, 6 1/2-hour days at his new Pre-K autism classroom at the elementary school. He gets out at 3:30, and we get home about 3:40. He’s out like a light before 4:00. Today in the car, his eyes were open but he didn’t look at all awake to me.

Three days, three long death naps. That should tell you something about the challenge this is for him. But he’s handled it bravely and well. I can’t really even imagine what it’s like to be him and dumped into this incredibly structured classroom with a bunch of people he had seen once and go 6 1/2 hours in a brand new environment day after day with an all-new schedule and a lot more expectations of him. This must be what boot camp feels like, minus all the yelling, bald heads, and armaments.

As we know, autism is a journey of a million miles for our kids and for us, but you take it like you take any other journey - one step at a time, even if some of us who shall remain nameless and are three years old go rigid or noodly-legged sometimes when some teacher you just met tries to make you walk over to do something that you probably would enjoy doing anyway, just because you can or something.

In other news, I do have this enormous post I’ve been working on for a while. Hopefully I’ll finish it and post that over the weekend - tropical storm permitting - and get us into something other than preschool and IEPs for a while. If you live along the East Coast, stay safe!

Phew! He did well today. Here’s the really brief report.

Me = cute; teachers = know it; Daddy carrying all my crap into the school = pack mule; going to my classroom without Mommy and Daddy = enough crying to make said Mommy and Daddy feel guilty; Mommy and Daddy = now what?; transitions = bad; attitude toward things after I transition = fine; music = great; Head and Shoulders = Knees and Toes; puzzles = good; lunch = scarf; sweet tea = ahhhh; water in my cup = whatchu talkin’ ’bout Willis?; fingerpaint = eh; kids movin’ to the music = funny; soft things to chill on = mmmm pillows; picture schedules = what the…?!; WALKING out with the teacher at the end of the day = no problem.

My bed after a hard day at school even though I NEVER nap = priceless.
 

(Extra credit - wearing a sleeper to nap in so I don’t strip naked and pee off the side of the bed = less carpet cleaning for Daddy.)

As a kid, I was always amazed by those escape artist type magicians. I couldn’t believe they could get all the stuff off, while underwater, while a hungry hungry hippo was coming towards them. (Hippos… one of the deadliest animals on earth. No seriously. This factoid brought to you by the letter P, and the number 1.)

I am no longer enamored by escape artists. Their twisty ways, their ability to shuck off chains, their double jointedness. Not cool at all.

The reason is this:

Recently the J-man started wearing 2 piece pajamas to bed, because we couldn’t in good conscience stuff him into the sleepers anymore. You will remember the Hulk. Now though, he has learned that it is VERY easy to take those pajamas off, especially the bottom part. From there, it’s a quick journey to taking off the diaper/pull-up, and throwing both onto the floor. This usually ends (heh, ends) badly - Mama and Daddy have to wash all the sheets, the pajamas, and the J-man because of the gallon of urine all over everything.

Yesterday after non-nap we had to change the sheets. This morning, J-man had managed to take off the pajamas sometime between the last time I checked on him last night, and before he woke this morning… so the pull-up and pajama pants were still completely dry, while the pajama top, sheets, last vestige of the bumper pad, mattress? soaked. I had two sets of sheets (we do sheet/mattress cover/sheet, although that will change since he can soak through all 3 at this point), a blanket that had been almost under the crib, but not enough that it was missed when he peed off the side, and pajamas. I washed them all, washed down the mattress and re-made the bed. I also gave the J-man a bath (completely confused him) which he was not happy about - so he peed on the floor of the bathroom while I was running the water!

When naptime came, I remembered those blanket sleepers we had - they are slightly bigger than the old lightweight sleepers, so we put him in one of those. Ha! Let’s see what you do now!

Here’s what he did: he somehow managed to un-tape the diaper on one side, then slide it completely down the other leg and wedge it into the foot of the sleeper. He did actually nap. He woke up in a puddle, with a soaking wet sleeper (except of course for the footie part where the dry diaper was!). David Copperfield has nothing on my kid.

2 sheet changes in one day is too many. Tonight, he’s stuffed into one of the old sleepers. We’ll see if it works.

Because the J-man has recently gone to wearing 2-piece pajamas (I’m telling you, we tried to keep him in sleepers for as long as possible!), we have had some issues.

Some of it is good: the J-man is learning more about self-care. He is very good at putting his arms through shirt sleeves, and working hard at stepping into shorts. He definitely knows that his socks go on his feet, but will just lay them over a foot because he can’t figure out how to open the top.

Also good: J-man is learning to help take his shorts off. He can already rip his socks off - mostly through effort because he likes to be barefoot whenever possible. He doesn’t like taking his shirt off though, and will fight that.

However… Saturday morning when Tim got up with J-man, Tim walked into the nursery, and the J-man was there with a shirt on. No pants. No overnight pull-up. Lots of pee (crib, sheets, remaining part of the bumper pad). Saturday night, when I put the J-man down, he stayed awake for a while. I joked to Tim that I should check on J-man to make sure he was still wearing clothes. I JOKED! And then I walked in. Little man lying there sound asleep… wearing a soaked shirt, with soaked sheets, and the pants and pull-up on the floor. Bare ass shining brightly. Picking up a wet, sound asleep toddler, trying to get him clean and into new pajamas, stripping the bed and putting on clean sheets, all while trying not to wake him? Awesome.