Bedtime Woes

I'm going to use this post to complain about share Jackson's bedtime issues while posting pictures of the zoo. We went to the zoo on friday and pretended it was warm. We had a great time!  I'm hoping these cute pictures of him help me be less annoyed by the poop storm that is bound to happen tonight.

 

Here come the bedtime woes:

 

A couple weeks ago a switch flipped and Jackson totally refused to go to bed.  He has always been (after some sleep training early on) a great night time sleeper.  I could put him to bed between 6 and 7 and he would sleep until 6 the next morning with no wake-ups.  He was consistent so it was very rare that I was in his room in the middle of the night.

 The majority of the past couple of nights he puts up a huge fight and comes up with every excuse to not go to bed.  He wants to keep the door to his room open but then he stands at the gate and yells, "Mommy, come up here.  Mommy, I want to come downstairs too."  There are lots of variations of this theme.

 

(Charley has been struggling too but she's sick/teething and is 8 months.  Her wakings are more acceptable.)

 We usually go in a couple times and tell him it's night time and that he needs to lay in bed.  After kicking doors, crying and screaming, and several visits from Bryan and I, he finally goes to sleep.

Unfortunately he is also waking up in the middle of the night several times.  He wakes up and basically does a repeat of the bedtime process.  Ugh. 

 

"You talkin' about ME??" 

 The morning comes too soon and he is up for the day at 6am.  The part that makes this so hard is that he doesn't nap.  We have similar struggles throughout his "rest time" every day as well.  After 12 hours of him being awake, he HAS to be exhausted.  I keep waiting for these short nights to catch up to him but so far, he is fighting hard to keep sleep away.  And I'm going crazy.

 We've had visitors almost every night the last week so hopefully now that our schedule is kind of back to normal (until Mimi comes in a week and a half) we can start fixing this.  In the meantime, I am using every last bit of patience and love I have stored up.

 Then I see pictures and see what a little boy he still is and it reminds me that this season will pass.  And soon.  But until then, SLEEP KID!

Good night!  May your children sleep tighter than mine.