Bird on the Street

Sleep Success

8:06 am

Well, since my last bedtime post, we’ve been working an tweaking the ritual, trying lot so new and different things and also reading a lot on children and sleep issues.

Two things stood out for me in my reading: the first, was the neurologist’s assertion that some brain injured kids don’t need as much sleep as typical children. I’d never considered that. The second thing was an article that said that trouble falling asleep is most-like an issue related to routine.

I went with the easy way out first–I enforced zero bedtime. This resulted in several nights where he was up past eleven. Eventually he would whine or fall asleep on the floor and we’d put him in bed.

Then he’d sleep half the day at school, which was the opposite of what we were going for.

Then, I switched things up and put him in bed at “bed time,” but letting him play with whatever he wanted. This went well, but he was still up til almost eleven–an improvement, but not a great one.

Further research revealed that problems with going to sleep are often a result of not having a good bedtime routine. Sigh. I’m not a fan of routines. I also find that the more pregnant I get, the less I feel like doing anything in the evening.

But we did it anyway. We stuck to a very rigid 9:00 bedtime, which is later than most four-year-olds, but acceptable to me. We follow the exact same routine every evening.

Guess what? It’s working.

He’s falling asleep before 10:30 every night. He takes about a one hour nap at school. He doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night crying.

He’s also in a better mood during the day, participating more in therapy, and just generally seems happier.

It’s not a miracle cure–we’ve had a bad night or two, but it sure beats the night after night of getting up at two and three in the morning, and the hours of screaming before bed.

I’ll continue to keep y’all posted, but MAN is this better than before.

PS: I finished this post last night and OF COURSE we had a rough sleepless night–luckily, we knew what we’d done wrong, which makes the sleepless nights a lot easier.

Filed Undermedical, parenting

Letting Strangers Parent My Child

10:05 pm

I want to thank you all for the kind and insightful comments you left on our last post.

I read each one and considered it, and instead of responding to each one like I normally do, I just sat there and digested everything. Then I just let it sit for a few days.

There were several good suggestions there–and some of them sparked other ideas in me.

After discussing these things with The Husband, we’ve decided to put off the sleep study for now.

I’ll let you know if we discover anything as we test out a few ideas, and I’ll definitely keep you informed if we choose to go forward with the sleep study in the future. Right now we just want a little more time to make sure we’ve tried out all the non-invasive options.

Filed Underdecisions, medical

This Isn’t Seattle

10:27 pm

But we sure are sleepless.

For probably the last two years, Charlie has struggled with sleep. We have a rough patch, make adjustments, and then another rough patch crops up. It can take up to two hours for him to fall asleep and once he does, there’s a good chance he’ll be up anywhere between three and five AM. We have tried probably everything under the sun. No lights. Lights on. Early bedtimes. No bedtimes. Noise makers. No noise. Fan on. Fan off.Different rooms, different temperatures, different clothes.

We’ve tried a lot of different things and it seems like lately there are far more bad patches than good. When we finally got the point where he was sleeping a few hours each night and then two hours at school, we knew it was time to bring it up with the doctor. At our most recently neurology visit we discussed potential issues:

1. His cerebral palsy is causes low tone in the throat, and that, in turn is causing sleep apnea.

2. He’s having some kind of seizures either at night or while he’s sleeping.

3. His brain injury has made his body unable to properly regulate sleep.

None of these things can be diagnosed by looking at a child, so this past week we spent a good couple of hours meeting with a pediatric sleep specialist. She seems to be leaning towards possible apnea. Our neurologist is leaning towards regulation issues. Either way, Charlie’s on the schedule for a sleep study next week.

Yep. My preschooler covered in electrodes and trying to sleep. That promises to be veeeery interesting.

Either way, we’ll hopefully get some answers.