Well, my back hasn't but my sleep has.
Remember how I used to sleep with one, two and sometimes three munchkins in a makeshift bed on the family room floor? I learned an important lesson this summer after we ripped up the cheap carpet that had been installed when the girls were babies. Couch cushions on hardwood floors slide. I suffered through two horrible nights of sleeping with one kid on either side of me and couch cushions sliding all over the place. Yeah, that didn't really work out. Especially when Anna likes to dig her feet into the groove between the cushions pushing them further apart.
So Rich started sleeping downstairs on a couch if two of the girls ended up in our bed. Sometimes he was able to convince one of them to sleep down there with him. Rich doesn't get good sleep downstairs. He's always complaining about all the weird noises. For some reason, our refrigerator is a noisy one and then there's the heat and the furnace. And the elves who come out to clean while we sleep.
Those noises never bothered me. In fact, I was sleeping better downstairs before we tore up the carpet. With two kids in the bed, I have no room to move and when we sleep sideways, my feet hang off of the side of the bed unless I can somehow maneuver to sleep at an angle. And after the Disney incident, I'm paranoid that someone is going to fall out of the bed again.
We had an area rug stored in the basement that we decided to place in the family room to warm the room up. (Yes, we are still decorating th house.) The rug needed to be cleaned though. We picked it up from the cleaners after our vacation and gave it a new home. After a few nights of horrible sleep last week, I told Rich that I would rather sleep downstairs if we have too many munchkins not sleeping in their own beds.
I know someone is reading this and thinking, "Why don't their kids sleep in their own beds? Why don't they just make them?" Well, when a three and a half year old comes into your room in the middle of the night and says that she's scared, what do you do? I can tell you (because we have tried it) that if I bring her back into her room and sit with her until she falls back asleep, which could be awhile, she will most likely be awake again within an hour and back in my room. I am usually up for work by 6:20 in the mornings. I'm too tired for these games.
Now that there is a rug on the floor, the couch cushions don't slide around and the couch cushion bed has been resurrected. I have been sleeping much better too. In the very near future, we plan to purchase real mattresses for the girls' beds and transition them to big girl beds. (Their cribs converted to toddler beds in addition to full size headboards and footboards.)
I'm thinking that when they do have full size beds and someone comes charging into my room in the middle of the night, I'll just bring her back to her bed and sleep with her there. Or at least stay for a bit and hope that no one else wakes up in the meantime.
Okay, so I have a bit of a funny story that I'm going to tag onto the end here because it is somewhat related. I have been confusing Anna and Emily at night when they wear the same pajamas. Allie is easy to identify because she's been wearing a sundress over her pajamas. One night, I thought Emily was in our bed. I didn't remember how she got there but I woke up and there she was sleeping in the middle of the pillows. I gave her little cheek a kiss and then realized that she was Anna. I then got up to go to the bathroom and realized that I had (in my sleep) put my fleece on backwards. When I asked Rich what time she had come into our room, he said he didn't know because I was the one who put her in the bed. In my sleep.
When I checked on the girls Saturday night before I went to bed, I realized that Anna's pull-up needed to be changed. She managed to sleep through most of the change and sort of woke up at the end. I sat by her bed for a few minutes to ensure that she was back to sleep. Rich and I had been asleep for about an hour and a half when she came into our room. I suspected she would because I had disrupted her sleep earlier. About two hours later, Allie came running in.
I picked up Allie and told her that we would go sleep downstairs. Anna was still asleep in the bed with Rich. I walked into the hall with Allie to find Em's door wide open, which isn't how we keep the doors when sleeping. "Did you go into Em's room?" I whispered to Allie. "No," she whispered back. I walked into Em's room and saw that her bed was empty. We headed off to Anna's room. I had a minor heart attack because I didn't see her at first. Okay, long story short - Emily was in our bed and we thought that she was Anna.
Rich went the whole night thinking that Em was in the bed and was thoroughly confused the next morning when Anna was crying out in the hall and Em popped up in the bed and said, "I waked up!"
I'll leave you with a quote from Allie from this weekend. "Emily, are you Emily or Anna?"
9 comments:
LOL oh man the story at the end is GREAT! We have identical BBB and I can't wait for those conversations. "Which one are you?"
Oh, too funny. Not being identical, I don't have any problem telling our girls apart (except from behind from time to time).
With regard to sleep, I can't imagine as we have never let the kids sleep anywhere but in their beds. Kids are SUPER SMART and they learn what works! We had to go through the "I'm scared" issues for a while and they still have bad dreams from time to time, but I only sit with them a few minutes to settle them, then it's back to sleep for everyone. I don't want them to be scared, but keeping the house awake is not acceptable either.
Everyone has their own challenges and different things work for different families. God bless ya'll cause you are clearly doing a wonderful job with those cutie patootie girls!!! Hang in there!!!!
Oh, and congrats on Best Photography at Multiples and More!!
There are a lot of funny things in your post today, but my favorite is that Allie likes to wear a sundress over her pjs! :) I just have one son and he's a horrible sleeper, so I can appreciate that you just need to do what you need to do to get any sleep with three of them!
The switch from a toddler bed to a twin was the best thing that ever happened to my back. Now I can lay down with him and not half crouch over his tiny bed half on the floor. You will not regret it.
Long time reader, infrequent commenter =)
My best friends growing up (from pre-school until present, as women in our thirties) are identical twins. When I was three, in preschool, I was likely overwhelmed by the entire experience and pretty indifferent. I was friends with both, but not sure if I even knew what "telling them apart" meant. By my second year, I could completely distinguish the two - moreso than my mother, our teachers, teacher's aides,etc. A lot of the other kids could too, again with a lot more accuracy than most adults. I'm not sure if this is a common occurence elsewhere, but somehow as children, we were more aware of the small subtle differences. What's odd, is that if I look at our childhood pictures as an adult, I now have a hard(er) time telling them apart.
I bet once their peers get to know them in the school system, it will be surprising how able they are to distinguish. At least based on my own experience...
Love your blog! My 2 year old daughter loves the pictures of the girls as well!
This post really cracked me up. Love Allie's choice of upgraded sleepwear, love the confusion in the middle of the night stories and most of all, love "Emily, are you Emily or Anna?"
My 6 y/o comes into our bed every once in awhile. I don't bring her back up to her room - it wakes me up too much and I need my sleep. My 2 y/os have never been in our bed at night (it's a queen, 5 of us won't fit so we never started it). We are SO blessed that they don't really wake at night (knocking on wood here). This morning, one of my girls woke at 6 screaming/crying and that means she woke up her sister. I went into the room to try to calm her and get them back to sleep but it wasn't happening. So I sat on the floor, with a kid on each leg and ended up falling asleep sitting up, leaning back on the toddler bed (head/shoulders on mattress). OUCH! I was hurting at 7 when I woke up late for work. I might reconsider letting the littles in my bed.
I don't know if this would work for your family, but when I was the girls' age, I was completely freaked out by sleeping alone in my room. Every night I used to go into my parents bed until they were totally sick of a little body in the middle.
So, my mom bought me a very cute new sleeping bag that i helped pick out, and from then on, if I wanted to go to sleep with them, I HAD to sleep on the floor with my sleeping bag. Either it was the floor or my bed. It was usually the floor. My parents had carpet, by the way.
I hope you can get some sleep soon!!
-Molly
I was in a similar sleep situation for much of 2010. I knew it was a short term solution to just haul them into my bed, but when I realized they were never going to just sleep through the night on their own and that I may still be doing this a year or two from now, I knew I had to change things.
We talked about it, and talked about how they needed to sleep in their own bed all night. They knew my bed wasn't an option, and that meant tears a few nights, but overall our sleep situation is so much better.
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