Sleepy Ailey

Ailey is in most ways a typical 3-year-old. She likes cartoons, picks on her younger siblings, moans and groans about going to bed sometimes. Every once in a while she really just can't sleep. We have one rule: she stays in bed. She can read with the light of her nightlight, Doodle if she wants. But she's supposed to stay in bed. That way, when she does finally succumb to sleep she's where she's supposed to be.

Lately she's been having an even more difficult time falling asleep since she quit the "binky" cold-turkey. I won't go into why she was still using a binky, but it had to do with her brace. Anyway, the second difficult night when we heard her moving around in her room we decided not to intervene and just wait to see what happened as long as she didn't come out of her room. We heard her turn on her light, flip pages in books, and eventually she went quiet. When we checked on her, lo and behold, she had turned her light back off, gotten into bed, covered herself and fallen asleep. We were pretty impressed since a night like that would usually go considerably less smoothly.

So tonight when she complained that she was "just not tired" I gave her a little more allowance and said that she could turn on her light as long as she turned it off and got into bed when she was ready to sleep. Well, she was ready to sleep, but apparently too sleepy to turn off the light and get herself back into bed. Instead we found her on her bear chair by the bookshelves. How do kids fall asleep in these strange contortions?!