The downside to sleeping alone

Nikola has been sleeping in his own little bed (his new bed! with the Thomas (the tank engine) sheets!) in his own room for about a week now.  It hasn’t exactly been a smooth transition and for awhile we were getting up every two hours or so to help him settle back down in bed because he’d wake up, panic, and cry. Naps go more easily than bedtime, possibly because his room is better lit and he can hear me moving around. When he wakes up, he runs out of the room screaming I’M AWAKE I’M AWAKE I’M AWAKE I WAKE UP NOW just to make sure we’re all on the same page vis-a-vis his sleep/wake cycle.

Settling him down continues to be an issue, however. While he no longer screams and sobs and begs us to “sleep with me… just a little bit, ok? just one more time, ok?” or to “put your head riiiiiiight here… in this spot… riiiiiiiiight here” while patting his pillow invitingly, he has figured out that he can totally play with toys and put off actually sleeping. On the one hand, he’s 2 1/2 so he pretty much is awful at things like “stealth” and “playing quietly” (he’s recently learned to whisper, but it’s a VERY LOUD whisper and usually involves him whispering I AM QUIET. I AM SO QUIET. I AM BEING VERY QUIET. which is like a red flag for “hey, look at me! I’m doing SOMETHING and you should probably find out what.”

So while he isn’t very good at being quiet, he still manages to put off actually going to sleep for awhile. And I’m never sure how long that while is. And that makes me kind of nervous because that is the sort of controlling person that I am.

Another downside is that we haven’t turned on the heat on yet and he’s really, really warm and I kind of miss having 30 pounds of toasty toddler curled up at my back. Things I do not miss: having 30 pounds of toddler scrape his toenails along my abdomen; having 30 pounds of toddler punch me in the face; having 30 pounds of toddler yank fistfulls of my hair out by the roots every time he rolls over. It’s a mixed bag.

We continue to discover just what constitutes a security object for Niko. His love affair with Carl the Elephant and Baby the Baby Doll continues, but he no longer REQUIRES them to sleep. He seems to cycle through sleep loveys, and his must-haves have included the following:

• a fuzzy blue blanket
• a talking book with hard plastic pages
• a rock
• a different rock
• a wooden magnet train
• a plastic mold-a-rama train with a snapped-off funnel we got at the Museum of Science and Industry
• a sock monkey
• a toilet paper tube
• an unwound, knotted, colorful ball of yarn with a duplo window tangled in it
• a stick

His consistent needs, though, include a night light, a flashlight, and the door being open. The last is inconvenient because his room is directly off the kitchen and also very close to the bathroom, which means after I settled him down tonight I took a shower and heard, as I turned the water off, a tiny voice piping out “are you all clean mama?” Then the clatter of a rock being dropped and the worried requests to come find said rock, which is not really what I want to hear while I’m dripping wet and naked at 9:30 at night.

Other than that, though, things are pretty groovy.

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