electric boogaloo

Today started around five in the morning. Hard to say with no accurate clocks – we mainly have them for the soothing ticking white noise – but that’s my guess based on how many cursewords my brain put in between Oh my and God.

A few months ago I trained Graham to sleep through the night using sort of a modified system of Cry It Out, based on the Ferber method. The Ferber Method, if you aren’t familiar, works like this:
Night 1: Stand by the baby’s crib. When he cries, pick him up immediately and take him to your own bed.

Night 2: When he cries, don’t pick him up immediately. Drag your ass a little. Then instead of taking him to your bed, take him somewhere less appealing. Like the futon in the guest bedroom, or the main hallway.

Night 3: When he cries, don’t pick him up at all. Unless he like really really freaks out.

Night 4: When he cries, hug him and say “Aw, do you need a hug?” and then lay him back down. Then stand next to the child’s crib and pat him gently on the stomach for two and a half hours, or until your arm is completely numb. After 2.5 – 3 hours, he should go to sleep.

Night 5: You did it! You got him to sleep! IN HIS CRIB. All you have to do is pat his stomach for 1-3 hours every night. Isn’t it nice having a sleep-trained baby?

This is all based on my memory of the Ferber Method books, which I’ve never actually read but I know people who have read them, and I’m pretty sure I got the basic system down right because it worked. Until a couple of weeks ago, when his molars started coming in and he somehow got his hands on an assault rifle. See? The problem isn’t a lack of gun control laws, the problem is that no one is enforcing those laws in order to keep illegal weapons out of the hands of angry teething children.

So he’s been waking up throughout the night, making demands and threatening me until I give in and bring him to our bed.

Then at some point we are joined by the scientist, who is also a dolphin — it’s complicated — because the scientist had a horribly scary dream which was so violent and scary that he doesn’t want to tell me about it because it might scare me but really if he could sleep in our bed that would be great.

Which is all very peaceful and cuddly family time until Graham notices that his brother is here. “Budder! Budder der.” He points and grins, because oh boy we are going to have some great fun. And some of us do have fun. I’d say as many as 50% of us have Padre Island spring break levels of fun, jumping on people’s heads and poking eyes and playing peekaboo using the only blanket. The other 50% of us keep our eyes closed as much as possible and try to remember what Ferber said about 5 AM giggling dolphin/scientist pillow fights.

No wait. I take that back. 25% of us keep our eyes closed and try to remember the Ferber thing. The other 25% of us stay asleep throughout the event.
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That’s where I fell asleep last night while writing this post. I promise there was a lot more to the day than that, although on reflection none of it was all that exciting. Except for the part where Nicolaus used his allowance to buy a huge package of pretend money for his pretend stores and so he could be pretend rich. He thought it was hilarious that he was using real money to buy pretend money. Meanwhile I used real money to buy real stuff that I was pretending to need. So, you know.

And then some other stuff happened and we all went to bed, except for me because I wasn’t tired and I wanted to really quick post about the day.