don’t have children, just laugh. They say I’m over-tired and being ridiculous. Am I?
One friend who has a son a few months older than mine swears their cognitive thinking
doesn’t make the cause-and-effect links required to manipulate me in such a way. Is he
right?
I think not. J-man has, for the past three Sundays in a row, puked at bed time. He’s in
daycare and I’m always explaining that it’s because of one illness or another. But is it?
It could be. He could be teething. It could be because of his last cold or the pneumonia
he had two weeks ago. It could be because he likely has asthma (he has puffers, and
always has had them, but only needs them when he’s sick but it’s too early to tell).
Maybe crying causes some breathing or choking issue. I’ve said this over and over for
the past three weeks. And now? I’m not so sure. How bad would I feel if any of this were
actually true and I treated it as a tantrum?
Tonight (a normal Tuesday night), J-man was impossible to put to sleep. We had a
bath, a bottle, a couple of songs, a rock in the chair, a snuggle, a kiss, and then another
snuggle and another kiss. Most nights he’s close to sleep by this time, but not tonight.
Next, off to bed and a nice long back rub. On other nights this is the end of J-man, but
not tonight. He’s up! Won’t lie down. It’s 10 p.m. and we’ve been working on the bed
time routine for over an hour. It is clearly past bed time for both J-man and Mom.
So now what do I do? I tell J-man it’s night-night time and he needs to lie down. I give
him one more kiss and another snuggle, but I don’t take him out of his bed. My husband
always says my problem is that I take him out of his crib. (Usually in the middle of
the night. J-man is almost two and still gets up usually twice each night. I am totally
exhausted.) I tell myself he’ll just cry for a couple of moments and then drift off to sleep.
This happens not infrequently when he’s restless. I leave him hysterically crying for me.
I put a load of laundry in. My husband, who almost never puts J-man to sleep, helpfully
tells me J-man’s just being manipulative, and last night, when I had a late-night work
call and he put J-man to sleep, there was no such nonsense.
I feel guilty and go back in for another back rub. It’s been maybe five minutes. Just like
on Sunday, I can smell what he has in store for me from outside his bedroom door.
Yup, he’s vomited all over himself, his crib, the floor, the abc mat beside his bed and,
yup, the toy box. I want to cry. I am exhausted. I have a brief due in the morning that
I planned to write before bed and at least two loads of laundry ahead of me. I call for
help and my husband is too pissed to be at all helpful. He insists he's washing bottles
and too busy to help (not the approach I took when it was he who entered the barf-filled
room on Sunday night).
I start the cleaning process. Have to clean the floor before I can even get to my baby
covered in vomit. He’s now stopped crying and is singing. He’s pointing at the CD player
and asking for another song. I put him and the abc mat in the bath. The extra set of crib
sheets is in the dryer but not yet dry from the last pukefest. (My husband forgot to put
them in the dryer Sunday night after the washer finished, so two days later I had to re-
rinse them and now they are on their way.) Clean-up takes over an hour, and the sheets
are dry. By this time hubby is helping and making the bed. He tells me he’s had enough
of this nonsense and he’ll be putting J-man to sleep from now on.
I clean the abc mat and start another load of laundry. It would be nice to share the bed
time routine. It’s a discussion we’ve had many times. It’s a commitment we’ve made
many times. I expect this one will again pass in a couple of days, and things will go back
to normal. In the meantime, I do believe my kid doesn’t want to go to sleep. And I think
he’s figured out that if he pukes, he’ll get out of it — at least for a little while! I think he’s
manipulating me.
-Sleepwalking Mama
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