Poppy has always had a tenuous relationship with sleep. Over the years she has successfully sleep-trained me into being an anxious, jumpy mess about bedtime. Once she’s actually asleep she’s a pretty great sleeper but getting her to sleep is another story. It involves a precise routine featuring various lotions and essential oil pillow sprays and a specific number of stories read in an exact order and a gently heated unicorn heating pad and an army of stuffies lined up in a certain order on the end of her bed. The light needs to be on but not too bright. She needs a back rub and an arm tickle and don’t you dare confuse the two. She needs a parent with her until she’s in a deep sleep and if you try to sneak away while she’s sleeping lightly she will instantly wake up and yell at you and you’ll be back at square one.
I wish I was exaggerating.
Listen, sleep is a very personal thing and people make choices that maybe you wouldn’t make for your family and that’s okay. I’m not complaining about Poppy and her sleep habits, I’m just trying to set the scene.
Another thing you should know is that Poppy loves sleeping in our bed and hates her bed. A few weeks (months? What is time?) ago Shawn and I decided to start walking her back to her bed whenever she crawled into our bed in the hopes that it would break her of her midnight habit and maybe our sleep would improve. We have a king-sized bed but we’re not small people and having Poppy crawl between us to sleep horizontally in a soul-crushing “H” formation was starting to impact our happiness. We had a plan and good intentions and Poppy is doing whatever she can to break our spirits. We thought it would take a few nights of dedicated, firm, loving boundaries to get her sleeping through the night in her bed but we’re many nights into this exercise and the end is nowhere in sight.
Which brings us to last night. Last night Poppy crawled into our bed over and over until finally I ended up sleeping on the floor beside her bed as the only compromise she would accept. I thought it would take half an hour or so before she was sleeping deeply enough for me to sneak back into my bed so I grabbed a pillow and a blanket and settled in on the carpet. I woke up hours later, twisted and sore. I was cold and had somehow managed to end up wedged between the doorframe and the bed. I tried to coax my stiff body upright when I heard Poppy shift beside me in her bed. I stopped, terrified that I would wake her up and have to re-start the bedtime routine at 3am. I moved delicately, inch by inch, holding my breath and freezing whenever I heard her move, until what felt like an hour later I was finally un-pretzeled and could stand. I gingerly made my way over to my side of the bed, pulled back the blankets, and found Poppy fast asleep.
My brain quickly cycled through a series of emotions (frustration, confusion, delirium, etc.) and landed on perplexed. I walked back to Poppy’s bed, sure I had lost my mind, wondering if I’d accidentally been sleeping on one of her books and the noises I’d heard weren’t from Poppy shifting in her bed but from the pages rubbing together. I lifted her blanket and found our dog, our sweet but oh so stupid senior dog curled up in her spot, his head on her pillow, her stuffed unicorn spooning his back. I had spent a not-insignificant amount of time using my best evasive maneuvers to creep away from Poppy’s bed so as to not wake my dog while Poppy slept comfortably in my bed.
So anyway, that’s the story of why I can’t move my neck properly today but my child and my dog are both extremely well-rested.