And it was silent...

So, dear readers, you may or may not know (because I've moaned about it here, on various forms of social media, by text message or maybe by phone) that my kid has not been going to sleep. She's been going to bed and for the last three or four weeks we have a decent system of bedtime routine and then stay in your bed in place, but she would not go to sleep.

We're big believers in the you-can-lead-a-horse-to-water-but-you-can't-make-him-drink child rearing philosophy. We can make our child sit at the table during meal time, but we can't make her eat. We can make our child sit on the toilet before we go out, but we can't make her pee.

Apparently it applies to sleep too. We can make her go to bed, but we can't make her sleep. Once she figured out that she had to stay in her bed and be quiet, it was much more manageable, but mornings were horrendous. To the point where I got the daycare to shorten her nap in hopes that thirty minutes less nap would equal thirty minutes earlier to sleep. Yeah, right. Then we starting skipping breakfast. I'd roll her out of bed and into her clothes. We'd sleepily get her hair and teeth brushed and we'd stumble out the door to daycare. By the time we got to daycare she was awake enough to eat her breakfast.

I do blame a percentage of this no-sleep thing on the NHL...almost all of the Canucks games ended around 8:00...bed time...and our building is on a busy street near the Granville bridge. It got noisy outside our house. Especially when the Canucks won. J would get up and watch all the cars and celebrating folks. So, now that the playoffs are over, two months of disturbances pretty much every other night are over too.

Back to the no sleep. The other part of this is that Alex has been home in the evenings for a while and the last two nights he was on bedtime duty. Sunday night didn't go badly, but there was resistance from a toddler. Last night, I had to go out and you would have thought the world was ending. The same kid who runs sobbing down the hallway after Alex when he leaves for work at night crying "Daddy, don't go to work. Stay home. Daddy, don't go." was adamant that she wasn't staying with Daddy and only Mommy knew how to put her to bed.

A very tearful little girl walked me to the elevator and wailed all the way back to our apartment with Alex. What J didn't know was that I was just going to a strata meeting in our building, so I asked our next door neighbour when she arrived if she could hear J...nope. Thirty seconds after I left and all was well.

But I was convinced she'd still be awake when I got home just a few minutes after nine. Because it's been ten o'clock or later every night for the last two weeks. I opened the door very, very quietly and there was no noise. I tiptoed in and Alex appeared from our room, talking in his NORMAL voice. J had been asleep for over half an hour. Needless to say, this morning was very smooth, we had time for breakfast at home and J was in a great mood...

I don't know how he did it, but Alex is amazing. I'm now trying to convince him to figure out how he can be home EVERY night for bedtime...