Return of the Rocking Chair

I am so tired of being tired. Seriously, doesn't being tired suck? Now that we've been blessed with pretty consistent sleep for well over a year now, I had kinda forgotten how awful it is not to have it. In the last six weeks, Sweets transitioned to his big boy bed (sleep strike #1), came down with his first cold of the season (sleep strike #2), and then caught croup (sleep strike #3). For those of you keeping track at home, sleep is OUT in our house these days and oh man are we cranky about it. That's the thing about my son - when his sleep tanks, it really tanks. I mean, there's no halfway here, if you're going to do something, do it right ;)

So naturally, I have regressed into sleep obsession mode. I'm obsessed with everybody's sleep around here - Sweets, mine, Hubs, the cat, you get the idea. And when I'm in sleep obsession mode, I start thinking of all the things I can do to improve the sleep climate in our house. Some of them are big fat flops (like setting up the Pack n' Play in a desperate attempt to get Sweets to nap, given that he takes blissful 2 hour snoozes in one at the sitter's house...yeahnotsomuch at his own house), and others, well, others have some real merit. I don't know what made me think of it, but I remembered reading a blurb in a Dr. Sears parenting book when Sweetie Pea was really little, about the things children will do when they perceive that they haven't had enough "touch time" with mommy and daddy. The gist was when there isn't enough loving physical contact between parent and child, you could start to see things like clinginess, separation anxiety, refusal to sleep, etc. And I realized that before we set up the big boy bed, we had a rocking chair in Sweets' room and we would sit in it every night to read books, and one of us would rock with him briefly and sing a couple of songs before putting him in his crib. With the new bed set up, the rocking chair got dismantled and relocated upstairs, and all we had to work with was that chair cushion on the floor. Sweets is like a busy little bee these days, and without the rocking chair, story time consisted of him running all over his room, pulling books off the shelf, flipping through them, talking about what's in them, and generally not calming down one bit.

Ding ding ding went my sleep-deprived brain! Bring back the chair! So yesterday, Sweets helped me drag it back downstairs (well, he did more watching than dragging) and reassemble it to make a cozy little reading nook (this he actually did assist with. Kid knows the difference between a screwdriver and an Allen wrench!). And guess what? We had a great snuggle before bed and it made a huge difference in how he went to sleep and stayed asleep.

Thank you God for Dr. Sears and rocking chairs.

The first thing he did upon me putting the freshly cleaned slipcover back on it was wipe a huge snot rocket on the seat. Boys!

It makes the room a little more crowded, but you know I'd sell my soul for decent sleep, so I consider that fairly minor ;)