Please let him stay in bed.
Oh, evening grownup time. Kids-are-in-bed time. Clock-out-of-parenting time. It is a precious decompression period – a chorus line of hours once able to accommodate a meal, a drink and a three-episode binge of The Wire.
But older kids stay up later, eroding our grownup time to an hour, sometimes two.
"I have one show in me," my husband often says when we meet on the living room sofa.
And our oldest son, Maxon, is doing everything in his power to sabotage what is left of evening grownup time by coming downstairs regularly to interrupt our catch-up talks and R-rated television because:
- He needs a hug.
- He can't stop thinking of the doll from the Annabelle TV spot.
- He forgot to do his math pages and he has to do them now.
- He wants a glass of water. Not from the bathroom sink, but from the kitchen sink.
- He wants a bigger glass because he doesn't want to keep going back to refill the small bathroom cups.
- Is this glass OK to use?
- Should he pick a different glass?
- He wants us to turn the music on in his room.
- He wants to confirm we will come into his room to check on him.
- His sheets are twisty.
- He can't sleep.
- Reading isn't working.
- He doesn't have anything else to read.
- His bed is making a funny noise.
- He wants to know what we are watching on TV.
- Can he watch it with us?
- When can he watch Walking Dead? When he is 14? How about 16?
- What about Game of Thrones?
- He wants another hug. A long one.
Now, Maxon was not easy to sleep train. He wouldn't take a pacifier or a thumb, and had no interest in self-soothing. We had to reboot him every few months, using tactics from our pediatrician and every sleep book on the market. It's worth noting that the No Cry Sleep Solution is pure fantasy, and it had me sitting in my house with the baby monitor to my ear like I was on a surveillance mission, ready to bust into his room at the first syllable of a whimper. When we tried one of the cry-it-out methods, the boy howled for an hour. One night I was on my knees in his dark bedroom as he cried, praying to God that I was doing the right thing.
Once we had Ezra, things got worse. As an infant, Ezra woke up once a night to eat and easily went back to sleep. But Maxon, who was 2, woke up three or four times a night to have a tantrum.
Those were good times.
I was so sleep-deprived that I was brushing my teeth with face cream and crying on the hour. I once broke down in front of his preschool teacher after drop-off. Concerned, she called me that night and gave me the advice that finally helped Maxon ease back into a full night's sleep. She told me how she'd noticed that Maxon needed "check-ins" during the day. He would break away from an activity for little hugs — hugelehs if you will — and then go back to the sand table or the LEGOs or a game with his friends.
"I think he needs a version of that at night," she explained.
Instead of the hard game I was playing in response to his nightly tantrums, she said I should indulge him with affection every time he wakes in a fit. Then, after two weeks or so, I could tell him that he's grown up enough to sleep without me checking on him.
I was very skeptical, thinking that the indulging would encourage the wake-ups, but it worked.
So, now we are seeing the 10-year-old version of his nightly toddler tantrums. And I'm trying to remember the good advice I received eight years ago. I should indulge his "check-ins." I should give him his hugs, let him get his water from the kitchen, answer his questions. And hopefully after a few weeks, he'll stop coming down the stairs and let us enjoy our rapidly shrinking grownup time.