Manhattan (Sleep) Project

Jake's on-going, repeated and cyclical issues with sleep (going to, falling, staying etc.) have made Marisa and I quite the pre-schooler research scientists. We are constantly looking for causation, patterns, alternative methodologies to get him to go to sleep so we can watch some G*d#mm%d "Prison Break" and have some kind of life together outside of, "Do you smell something?" "Where is (insert name here)" and "Can you please get (insert name here) I've got my hands full and you are just sitting there doing nothing.".

Along the way, we have learned to function on severely reduced sleep, to instinctively take over when the other is close to infanticide and generally cope with the fact that the odds of getting all of the kids to sleep on time and for them to sleep through the night at the same time are roughly the same as being attacked by a shark that is being struck by lightning.

Along those lines, another bedtime change. We were recently given a double bed, which was the plan for the boys down the line, they would each have their own double bed. Jake has cycled back to Armageddon-like bedtime struggles and one of the openings that our trained scientific ears heard was that he said he thought he would sleep better if he and Tanner shared the big bed. We had been toying with the idea of moving Tanner out of his crib for awhile now (needing it as we do for the baby-Jesus, even that sentence is crazy!) and figured that as long as bedtime sucks right now anyway, we might as well kill two birds with one stone. It makes no sense to get Jake to the point where he goes to bed easily and then to move Tanner and start all over again. So we jumped in and moved Tanner and Jake into the big bed as shown in the photo.

We are on our fourth night or so and it's getting easier. Jake is going to bed easier, although part of Tanner's nightime routine is hitting Jake in the head repeatedly, and Tanner likes the new bed. One of his consequences for the aformentioned hitting is being put back in his crib, which makes him cry. When you ask him if he wants to go back in the big bed, he points towards it, puts his binky in his mouth, grabs his stuffed monkey, and says "da". He is still getting used to getting himself to fall asleep in it with Jake, and Marisa has taken to laying between them until they both fall asleep, which allows me to write basically whatever I want, unchecked, on the blog. Tomorrow, my opinons on abortion, legalization of marijuana and who I think killed Kennedy....stay tuned.