Night Shift for Mama

Many parent of young children would probably agree with me that bedtime is about the worst part of the day, but then the end of bedtime, and moments afterwords, are among the best.

Until your children decide to require a night shift.

Last night, I got myself all the way into bed by eleven, which gives me 8 hours of bed-time, and was feeling pretty good about it.  Then, when I was just about asleep, I hear a funny little screech, and then nothing.  Buttercup had fallen out of bed and was sitting on the floor, dazed and stuck.  Our current bed arrangement is that Emerson and I sleep on the bed with a frame, which happens to be a modern style that is too close to the floor to store suitcases under, and has a funny little railing around it... you know, the kind that is really good for banging your shins in the middle of the night, and just takes up extra space in the room.  Which maybe is fine if you are trying to be an elegant furnished apartment, but less good once you move another set of mattresses into the room.  The girls sleep on two mattresses stacked right next to us, and between giving the closet doors enough room to open and the wall, there is just enough room to walk sideways between the same-height beds.

Or for Buttercup to fall and get stuck.  I'm not quite sure why this keeps happening, but I've been jamming a couch cushion in the space, but I forgot last night.  She got really wedged in there.  I really don't know how she does it!

Buttercup and I sleep on the insides of the two mattresses, which I cleverly arranged in the new house because she tends to need me the most in the middle of the night.  And she was not done with me yet.

After calming down from the wedged-under-the-bed problem, I was almost all the way asleep again,  when I suddenly hear desperate little-girl shrieking, and then bigger-girl surprised yells.  Buttercup had dived across the pillows and was sitting on Hibiscus's head, screaming and crying.  Hibiscus got woken up but missed the entire context, and kept repeating half-asleep, and then has mentioned several times today, "Buttercup is sleeping too close on my pillow."  The only one sleeping on Hibiscus's pillow was Hibiscus, it just happened to be in Buttercup's escape route!

It had the feel of a bad dream, but Buttercup was fully awake and staring desperately towards something.  I swooped her right out of bed -- and off Hibiscus's head, so she fell back asleep again.  I wondered if she needed to walk around and wake up more, but she seemed plenty awake, and she calmed down when I was holding her.  She pointed to my bed and said "me sleepy dere now."  I asked if she was worried about a bug, and she said "spider," starting to look upset again.  There are spiders around here and there, but nothing that is particularly invasive or scary.  But I'm not unduly afraid of spiders.  I'm sure Buttercup isn't the only one who wouldn't want to sleep in a bed where she had even dreamed about a spider!

We lay down, but she didn't settle.  She snuggled right up close to me and pressed her head into my chin, and then slowly relaxed, but not into sleep.  Then she suddenly started shrieking again and grabbing herself, and this time managed to yell "in my clothes, in my clothes!"  I brought her into the bathroom and turned on the lights, and we unzipped her pajamas and inspected them very carefully.  Then we inspected some more.  Buttercup is a very careful inspector!  There were no spiders of any kind, but I did cut off the tags in the torso, in case she was feeling that.  She was totally satisfied about the lack of spiders on her person, but thought they were all still hiding in the bed.  We got out a little light and did a thorough inspection of both beds, finding no spiders and no evidence of spiders.

Unfortunately, that woke up Hibiscus.  I wanted Buttercup to feel like we were taking the threat of spiders seriously, but not start Hibiscus worrying that there were actual spiders in the bed.    Hibiscus wakes up like a drunken jack-in-the-box, totally confused but totally active.  In this case, she suddenly started throwing pillows around, and repeating randomly "is dream, is a dreaming spiders, is dream spiders, Buttercup sleeping to close on my pillow."  Then she collapsed on one of the disarranged pillows and was back asleep again.

Buttercup spent the rest of the night in my bed.

Tonight, we had a discussion about the non-existence of spiders in the bed before lights-out, which seemed very comforting.  But no matter; Buttercup had passed the baton to her brother.

We started off the night running a little late, so the kids only washed their feet instead of full baths, and I only read one book.  And Hibiscus put up a little me-vs-the-world struggle, which resulted in all the children hearing a little speech about not bothering the other children when they are doing something particular.  And then they got to hear it again.  And again.  Hibiscus was pretending to ignore me, so I would sweetly say "since you didn't understand, I can explain again."  I forget if we got through four or five repetitions before she gave me a tiny acknowledgement.  When she actually agrees to something, she is usually good about following through, and she was silent while I did her siblings' blessings.

Emerson had seemed quite anxious for a while.  First of all, while getting out books, he worriedly asked me how to tell if something was a joke or a lie.  Usually at that point of night, he's more worried about which books he gets to choose and if Hibiscus is going to get more snuggles than he is.  Then when I settled down for his blessings, more concerns came out, with a lot of squirming and wiggling.  After a lot of examples, I told him to follow his heart, and that he could trust his heart to tell him if something was wrong, whether it was himself doing it or someone else.  Squirm squirm, wiggle wiggle.  He said what if something yucky was inside him and needed to get out. I said he could come to Daddy or I and we could help him get the yuckiness out him, and we wouldn't get mad at him.  Any time.  Like now.  He admitted there was a bad word, and it wanted to get out.  I told him he could whisper it to me.  He squirmed and wiggled and wormed.  We went back and forth for quite a while, the girls waiting impatiently for their blessings, and he finally whispered it in my ear.  And I told him to do it again.  He repeated it three times, and then he said it was out.  He told me it was a very, very bad word in Luganda that another child had taught him.  I didn't recognize it, and think it's possible that it wasn't anything particularly bad, but it was certainly bothering him.

But he was still squirmy and wouldn't lay facing me.  I thought something else was wrong, and told him to wait for me to do the girls' blessings and I would come back and we could talk some more.  Needless to say, the girls did their level best to make their blessings go on forever; Buttercup was especially dedicated to the project tonight.

When I came back, Emerson told me his bum was hurting and even swelling up.  We went into the other room to look at it... and lo and behold, there were little bits of poop debris everywhere.  Apparently he had needed to poop at school (which he normally avoids at any distress), and a teacher wiped him but was quick about it.  A half dozen hours in the tropical heat, and his poor unmentionables were pretty unmentionable.

So we went back into the bathroom and I started re-filling the tub again.  While it poured in, I held him close and asked if anything else was bothering him in his heart.  No, apparently it was all in the derriere at that point!

Then Buttercup sauntered in, sucking her water glass and looking all ready to catch the next episode of The Exciting Brother/Sister Show.  Emerson had not planned on airing the owie-bum story live, so he got upset.  I put her back in bed and told her to stay there.  She jumped on the bed and laughed, which got Hibiscus sitting up to scold her.  I had to get something from the main room, and there is the lively little shadow!  After our extensive conversation about not bothering other children, this did not fly.  I put her on a chair, and told her that she was disturbing her brother and sister, and that she needed to stay there until I came to get her, hoping to interrupt the domino effect of excitement.  This is the down-side of having three small children trying to sleep within eight linear feet of each other!

I figured that if Buttercup sat in the living room for a minute or two, she would get bored and sleepy, and Hibiscus had almost been asleep and hopefully would drop off once Buttercup was removed from the bed.  If Hibiscus wasn't alert to immediately respond to her every playfulness, Buttercup would get even more bored and fall asleep.  But when I went back through the bedroom to check on the poop-encrustment-soaking, I heard voices.... Hibiscus was sitting on the toilet, chattering with Emerson.

Hibiscus is firmly and cheerfully of the opinion that sitting on the pot is an iron-clad excuse for not being somewhere else, anywhere else, no matter how recently she has just gone and how firmly she was told to stay put.  In fact, being in the bathroom, and quickly flying her bum in the direction of the potty whenever she hears footsteps, has got to be pretty ironclad as well.  "But I've gotta POO-ooop!" she wails.  And pooping, as we all know, can take any length of time.  Like, the entire duration of a time-out or a quiet time.

This time, I told her to finish up.  And seeing the just-quoted words forming on her lips, I told her that if she needed to poop she could go in the other bathroom (which had fewer interesting people in it!).  I checked Emerson's bathing progress and gave him a one-minute soaping-up warning (because Emerson does better with lots of warning), and went back to check on Buttercup.  She was looking remarkably sleepy and contrite.  At heart, she really loves to be helpful and cooperative, but then she thinks she's got to be JUST like Hibiscus.  When she starts getting the same consequences as Hibiscus, but having to endure them personally and by herself, the charm of being Hibiscus is wearing off pretty quickly.  In this case, she was eager to promise to stay in bed and get some mama-hugs, and we cuddled and laughed off her brief attack of the sads on the way back to her pillow.

And then I went back to my poopy boy, and what do you think I found?  That's right.  Hibiscus was SITLL on the toilet.  And they were giggling even harder.  I told her that she would get in bed NOW, and she miraculously found that her entire bladder and bowels were empty and wiped.  She went scooting off, giving me furtive looks to try and figure out if she would get in worse trouble for not going straight out the door, or not washing her hands.  She made the correct choice of washing her hands.

I think she also knew that I usually separate the children when they're too rowdy, and that Buttercup had just had to sit in the living room after wandering all over the house.  Buttercup didn't really mind being left in the lighted room when she could hear her family, but Hibiscus is actively terrified of being in a room by herself at night.  I think the desire to not repeat Buttercup's fate propelled her straight into her bed.  This is the benefit of having three children in a row!

We got Emerson clean.  We applied two different types of cream and some ibuprofen too.  The bottom itself probably only needed the cream, but I knew the mind was going to get increasingly focused on the pain and discomfort, and hoped that belief in the power of medicine would help comfort it into sleep.

And then they were all asleep.  And now I'm going to go to sleep too. As their current favorite books says "She turned off the light,/ and shut the door,/ That's all there is,/ There isn't any more."  And I'm really hoping that the last line describes the rest of our night!