The Mega Bed

So, as many of you may know, my glorious children don't have the best track record when it comes to sleeping. They only sleep when it's absolutely necessary and for the least amount of time possible. They just don't seem to need, like or want to sleep. I, on the other hand, have very few marketable skills but sleeping is one of them. I remember the glory days when I would set my alarm on a Saturday morning just so I could turn it off, laugh in it's face and go back to sleep. Getting up early used to mean "sometime before noon" and sleeping through the night was a normal occurrence, not a special treat that we might get once a year. While Max has had his own special brand of sleeping issues over the last couple of years, Mia has really taken it to a new level because she not only hates to sleep, she won't sleep alone.

For the first couple of months home, she slept physically on me in our bed and if you even thought about moving or getting up to pee, she would read your thoughts and totally flip her shit until you knocked that thought out of your head and accepted your fate. I eventually learned how to roll her off so we then moved her crib into our room and would put her in after she released her death grip on me. That only worked for a week or so because then she would wake up and scream at me from behind the slats like an angry macaw so we put the crib back in her room. We then spent several weeks sleeping in the twin bed in her room with her, which wasn't much better than being in our room but at least it was progress. Not long after that, we started putting her in the crib and we could get her to go to sleep if we stood there rubbing/patting/scratching her back until she fell asleep and then we would use ninja training to exit the room as quietly as possible. We kept this plan up for a while until we decided to really go for broke and instead of patting her to sleep, we tried to get her to learn to self soothe so we (I) would lie on the twin bed with her in the crib until she fell asleep. This actually went okay after the first week or so of her screaming at us until she fell asleep from fatigue.

Once she realized we weren't going to leave the room (as far as she knew anyway), she was okay with this new plan. I would put her in the crib and play mahjong or angry birds on my phone for the 20 minutes it took her to drift off and then I would creep out and enjoy the rest of my evening. However, as it went on, it took longer and longer for her to fall asleep (like a damn hour) but then she was only sleeping for about an hour or so before waking up and it was then VERY difficult to get her to go back to sleep. And by difficult, I mean impossible. We would inevitably end up with her back in our bed anyway and I realized that I was wasting all that time playing dumb games on my phone trying to get her to sleep just to have it all blow up so we decided that we would just start her in our bed and then be able to at least do something at night like watch a TV show or eat a meal. This has been the plan ever since and is usually fine (or as fine as this shit can be, amirite?). USUALLY.

Since Max has also been watching this go on, he has decided that he also wants to sleep with us so he will use any excuse necessary to get in our bed. Some are legit, like when it storms or he pees in bed (yes, double fun!), but other times it's just flat out toddler ridiculousness that I have zero energy to deal with at 8pm at night so in he comes as well. Neither of these children understand the concept of personal space and will spread their bodies out as far as humanly possible so that Jeff and I have about 6 square inches to sleep on. Total. Not only that, but they move around constantly so you are always getting kicked, punched, kneed, farted on or hit in the face with a bottle. Throw in our mental patient of a dog and you can understand why this is not ideal so last weekend Jeff had the best idea he has had since deciding to marry me. After we came into our room to go to bed only to see the dog and both kids spread eagle again, he was like "I HAVE HAD IT WITH THIS SHIT." and he went in and broke down the twin bed from Mia's room and dragged it into our bedroom. The kids were like "wha?" and soon he had constructed the greatest thing in the history of mankind, The Mega Bed.

Oh yeah, this bed is amazing. It's our old king and the twin bed pushed together so it's about 98' long (not really) and takes up 80% of our freakishly large bedroom. I remember reading years ago that Prince had a room like this at Paisley Park, although I'm 99% sure his was used for certain adult activities and was probably a lot more fun than ours but you know what, I don't care. I HAVE MY BED BACK. Yeah, they're still right there and this is all more ridiculous knowing we have a four bedroom home but I can put up The Great Wall of Pillows and pretend like they aren't. They've been really good about staying on their bed and if they try to cross the great divide, I SHUT IT DOWN and expel them immediately. Who knows how long this will last but sweet lord I can't even fathom what will come after The Mega Bed. I think at that point I will have to have them surgically implanted in my body so we will never be apart. Hopefully the mental hospital will give us a group rate.