Musical Beds

I had been planning to write this post for a while now, but since today the New York Times featured an article exactly about this issue, I had to do it right away!! Here it is, my husband sent me the link this afternoon. Ha -- and did you know that if you click in the box that says "Share" on the right side of the article and then click on Permalink you get get a link for the blog that will still work even after it becomes part of the NYT archive? Good to know that!!

So, if you read the article, I wanted you to know that we could be one of the families featured in it (except for the detail that we don't live in New York, nor are we designers of maternity wear for department stores :) since our experience is very similar to these families'...

[Wow, it's raining really hard right now. I love to sleep with the sound of rain, it just makes snuggling under the covers so much cozier. Oh no... it stopped, I hope it starts again when I get into bed.]

I have already shared quite a bit of our sons' sleep history here (where I summarize both of my sons' sleep history and talk about night weaning my youngest and trying to get him to sleep through the night) and there (the post is titled "Goodbye Family Bed").

Since we moved the boys to their own room five months ago, we've been playing a lively game of musical beds several nights a week. Most often, my lovely husband is the one who gets up and goes to sleep with our oldest son in the futon who used to be in their bedroom, but sometimes the little one comes to sleep with me on our bed as well. Or, when they're sick, sometimes we trade places during the night.

The transition was pretty smooth for both of them and the youngest -- who has been sleeping in his crib since he was born, although for two years the crib was by my side of the bed -- generally spends the whole night in his crib (he can get out easily because we have one of those bed rails and there's a gap at the end). He sometimes needs to drink some water, or a kiss to settle back down, but he doesn't fuss much and gets up and out of bed. Ironically, sometimes when he is sick he sleeps better than when he is well, which is unbelievable!

Our oldest though... he's the one who has been giving us the most trouble. He can never go to sleep without an adult close to him. Then, if he wakes up in the middle of the night, he comes directly to our bed and one of us has to go with him to his room and stay there with him until he falls asleep. Generally that doesn't really work, he feels he needs to sleep with someone. Since in the past five months there was a futon bed in their bedroom, my husband spent many nights there with him. But tomorrow it'll be a week since we moved the boys to the small room that used to be our study and my parents arrived and are sleeping in the futon, so there's nowhere to go with him. Since we have a full bed, him sleeping with us is not really an option... so we really need to convince him to sleep in his own bed.

He's been complaining of bad dreams and he is afraid of the dark, unlike Alice's daughter, whose bad dreams started after Halloween, I don't know exactly when this started because he learned about monsters playing with friends and he may have been scared by a DVD that he watched, but I'm not sure. I guess some children are just "naturally" afraid of the dark, and others are not.

I will never forget one night when my brother and I were children. I think he must have been 7 and I 9. He was extremely afraid of the dark, he didn't even want to walk down the darkened hall to his bedroom. My mom then asked me to first walk down the hall and then to go outside. I remember the wind blowing and some lights from the house giving a faint light so I could see the trees. I grabbed some leaves from a tree so I could show him that I had really been out there and then I came back inside. It didn't really help him, but it became an indelible memory for me.

I don't know what we'll do to help my son and to have restful nights. My husband loves sleeping with him, but sometimes he's just too tired of playing musical beds. And I miss him by my side as well.

Now I'm going to bed, let's hope that the little one doesn't wake up too soon and maybe stays in his bed all night. Oh, and it's not raining heavily anymore :(