Fall Back

I hate the time change. Sure, it's nice in the summer to have an extra hour of daylight. But whatever. The time change screws up sleep patterns in my house for at least a week, and I'm ready to be done with it.

I'm having trouble sleeping lately, a problem I'd imagine is linked to stress. As a result, I've been taking Tylenol PM many nights of the week. However, drug-induced sleep does very little good when the little people in our house are waking me up every hour on the hour. I feel like we've flashed back to the newborn days.

Sadie is cyclically a bad sleeper, meaning that she gets into phases where she wakes up at the crack of dawn. She also gets into phases where she wakes one or more times in the middle of the night. Luckily, Ella is usually a very sound sleeper and very rarely wakes me in the middle of the night (and is never awoken by Sadie in the middle of the night, which is a happy fact since their rooms are so close together).

But last night, Ella did wake me--at about midnight. I'm not sure of the time, actually. I don't know whether or not the clock in the kitchen was ever set to "fall back." Ella needed water (and I won't even bother going into my "who needs water in the middle of the night?" tirade or my "don't wake me unless you're throwing up" tirade because I'm just too tired). An hour later, Sadie called me into her room for something. Sadie was up again two hours later asking whether or not it was time to wake up. It wasn't even 4:00 in the morning, so the answer was an unequivocal "NO!" She was up for the day a mere hour-and-a-half later.

Suffice to say that I'm groggy this morning and more than a little irritable.

In other news, we moved Sadie into a toddler bed over the weekend. What's funny about this is that I agonized over the same move with Ella for weeks before we actually did it. Talked about it with friends. Mulled over the pros and cons. Discussed it with our pediatrician. Bought a book for Ella all about her "big girl" bed. And waited on eggshells that first night to see if Ella would actually stay in her bed (she did). This time around, there was little fanfare. We had been talking about how when Ella got her new bed (she has long since outgrown the toddler bed), Sadie would get Ella's bed. I did take many, many opportunities to drill into Sadie's head that she HAD to stay in bed or else we'd put her back in the crib. But other than that, we just did it. We went to the mattress store on Saturday, found out they had the twin bed we wanted for Ella in stock, brought it home that afternoon, and moved the toddler bed into Sadie's room. No discussing or weighing or wondering or worrying. We moved Sadie into a bed, and that was that. I won't jinx myself by declaring it a success. I'll just so that so far, Sadie is staying in her bed.

The crib is in pieces in the basement, looking used and forlorn. It's probably not worth saving since taking it apart one too many times caused structural issues that had to be solved with the addition of nails that didn't come with the thing in the first place. Every time I go into the basement, I feel a pang of sadness to see this concrete reminder that our baby days are behind us. But honestly, after a night like last night, I think it's a reality I can fall back on.