Sleeping Arrangements

The girls in the family (including me) seem to have developed a nice summer cold complete with sneezing, coughing and post nasal drip at night. I think it may also be a touch of allergies too as many symptoms disappear during the day but come back like gang busters at night. So as with any stage in the life of a child, we are having sleep issues.

First off Aimee. For some reason she just can't fall asleep as easily at night as she once did. She begs me to sit in her chair next to her bed until she falls asleep. I did do this for quite a while but I finally realized that if she wakes up at night in her slumber state does not see me sitting there as I was when she fell asleep, she calls for me at the 2AM hour. So I firmly give the speech of she is a big girl and doesn't need mom sitting next to her at night. The result is a 9PM fall asleep time. She has also recently decided that she no longer wanted her bed rail on. Since she got her big girl twin bed two years ago, she has had this rail to keep her into the bed at night when she would go perpendicular across the bed. But on Sunday night she just looked at me and said "I don't want this rail on it anymore" and that was it. I wasn't sure how we would eventually get rid of it so once again my parenting is more about following her lead than creating one on my own.

Now Nicole has had the post nasal drip cough. And as many of us realize with this cough is that it really only wakes you when you aren't fully asleep. So just about that time in slumber when you roll over to reposition or take a look at the clock, Nicole has started to wake up calling for me. Normally I would let her cry a bit and hope she would settle back down. Sometimes I will go in and check to make sure things are okay. But this latest cry is an all out "I need you cry" so I think that she actually wakes up a while before she starts to call for me and just can't get herself back to sleep. So I go in, take her from her little toddler bed and bring her into our bed. Magically the coughing stops. I don't know if it is from the incline of her head now safely resting on my arm or just the comfort of mommy's bed. But she snuggles in and goes to sleep until it's time to get up. I hate to say it but I don't mind too much. She snuggles and sleeps with me whereas anytime Aimee is in bed with me I get a kick or two that would wake the dead. Nicole on the other hand is so little and petite that she just burrows next to me and gives me a big smile, closes her eyes and sighs off to dreamland.

Next up, a new house. We are moving on September 5th to a new house and I am not sure how our arrangements are going to change. We are going to have 4 bedrooms and the master bedroom is a suite that is a bit of a walk from their rooms. So I am already having some angst about how to prepare them for the move, how the first few nights in a new house and bedroom will be. And I am already brushing away a few tears knowing that we are leaving a house so full of memories from my own childhood as well as from the first few years of their lives. Plus we're moving away from Nana and Papa. Granted we're only moving a mile and a half away and in doing so, we are allowing our favorite aunt and uncle (my brother and his wife also known as Freddy and Tee Tee) to move out of their current apartment and into this house to create their own memories and live next to Nana and Papa and hopefully have some kids of their own.

More sleeping arrangements to come....