Every day things

Alice is a vampire.  She is the worst sleeper in our house.  When she was a baby, I blamed myself, my lack of adjustment to moving to North Carolina, and over coddling her to make up for Rex being so demanding during the day.  Turns out, Alice is just a vampire.

Our nights go like this: 

6:30-7:15: I turn into the devil trying to get the kids to clean up their giant mess, clean their room, get their jammies on and brush their teeth.

7:15: Stories, scriptures, prayers

7:30 Kids in bed.  Give Alice a bottle (yes she still drinks out of a bottle), lay down with Alice, tuck Rex in.

8-9:00: Do dishes, finish cleaning, etc.

9:00 on ward: convince Alice to get in the bed and stay there while she insists that she's not tired and can't sleep--probably because she doesn't stay in bed longer than 15 seconds at a time.

Eventually she falls asleep but is usually back up at 2:30 to get in bed with me.  Sometimes I allow this because I'm too tired to deal with it; sometimes I'm too tired to have a squirmy little something kick me for two hours so I sitck her back in her bed.

One night, I found her like this: laying in the doorway to her room.  Rex needed to sleep so he could get up for school the next morning so I turned off their nightlight to encourage Alice to stay in bed.  She did this instead. 

 Because she's up all night, it takes her a long time to wake up in the morning.

 This was the worst.   She woke up at 5 am insisting that she was done sleeping and refusing to be quiet.  She ran around the house for a while and eventaully succeeded in waking up the entire house.  At 7, I took Rex out to wait for the bus, which was late, no surprise there.  When Henry and I got back inside, she'd fallen asleep in front of the fire place.  I was not a happy camper. In fact, I was a very tired camper, but she slept for a few more hours even with Henry jumping on her until I had to wake her up to go to dance.

It's a good thing she's so cute.  Oh, guess what I just heard: Alice sneaking out of her room.  I'm going to pretend like I didn't hear her and enjoy my adult silence sequestered in the back room where she doesn't dare enter lest I turn off her night light.