Just to clear the air before I start, I’ll put this failure wholly where it belongs, and that’s on me.
Vacations always throw the Monster off. Anything that’s not highly structured, anything that involves having loose structure, these things all tend to make things difficult around our house in terms of trying to keep him moving forward. And… well, nothing’s been going on since Thursday, due to the holiday weekend. So what happened on Saturday was a predictable disaster. Continue reading
I’m going to throw this one out to the hivemind, because I’m absolutely stumped here.
A while back, we decided to let the Monster have his iPad overnight, in coordination with the melatonin and occasional drugging to try to get him to sleep through the night. My goal, frankly, is simple, and defers to a rule we used to (basically) have in my mother’s house – as long as we weren’t keeping anyone else up, it was okay if we weren’t sleeping.
Save that the last several mornings that I’ve gotten up for my daily walk/run, the Monster’s been up at 5 AM on his iPad. Continue reading
I’ve had a few folks tell me lately, especially when they see I’m more active online in the evenings, that they’re jealous that my kids are in bed so early.
And truthfully – the Monster is usually in bed by 7:30, and R shortly thereafter. It’s a good thing… kind of. Continue reading
For a while now, the wife has wanted to get the Monster into a big boy bed.
I’m not really opposed to the idea in principle. The major issue is that he likes the futon he’s been sleeping on, and I’m more of a “hey, if it works, don’t break it” kind of person. Continue reading
A while back, the Monster decided he’d rather sleep on the futon in his bedroom instead of the toddler bed… or really any bed.
Where I sit, this isn’t a problem. I don’t care what he’s sleeping on, as long as he’s getting enough sleep and isn’t putting himself in any real danger. The wife’s of a slightly different mind, and would rather he use a bed. Continue reading
The Monster hates showers.
I don’t know what it is, actually, about showers that he hates, since he does love the water so much. It could be the sound – all that noise that’s reverberating off the tiled surfaces in our bathroom – or it could be the sensation of the water and its pressure on his skin, or the fact that we tend to give him one in the morning before school/synagogue, or it could be something entirely different. Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I posted about the Monster getting moved from the nursery into his ‘big boy bedroom’ (see, “G’bye Mommy! G’bye, Abba!“).
We hear from a lot of our friends about the problems they have with their neuro-typical kids about moving into the big-kid bedroom at some point. We have friends whose kids yell and scream until they’re retrieved when they’re in there. We have others who have figured out that any gate in front of the door is hardly an impediment and manage to break out of solitary on a regular basis on their own. Continue reading
Before the baby was born, we planned on doing a few last renovations to our house to make sure we could use some of the rooms we’d not been using. A secondary goal in this, of course, was to let the wife move her study out of the third bedroom, and down to where my study, so that we could move the Monster into his own room. The goal of this, of course, was to let the baby move into the nursery and out of the master bedroom. Continue reading
We live in the area affected by the storm that hit on Friday night.
The wife had her book club that evening, so I had been ‘exiled’ to the family room to be out of the way. Throughout the evening, I’d noticed the forecasts by a local group advising that we ought to plug in our devices before the storm hit… and silly me, we didn’t do it. So, promptly about midnight, the power went out when the storm hit, leaving us in the dark. When we got up Saturday morning, the power was still out, with little sight of it being restored any time soon. Because of the heat, we made the decision to pack up and take the kids to sleep at my wife’s parents’ place, where there was electricity and air conditioning.
Of all the things that we do have trouble with at home, the least stressful of them is bedtime.
I remember, as a child, putting up plenty of fights about bedtime – wanting to stay up later to watch TV, or to read, or to just do anything besides go to sleep, which was boring. (Those were the days.) And inevitably, I had ways to get around those problems, but in the end, my parents won. Continue reading