Outwit. Outlast. Outplay.

We have been playing a little bit of "Sleep Survivor" around my house this past week. There have been experiments and challenges that keep us all on our toes vying for the power in the family. And it's all centered around getting our son to sleep in his "big boy bed".

As I've mentioned before, he was getting out of his crib for the past couple of months. So we figured if we are going to go through all this rigmarole, why not just get the big bed and get all this over with. And I'll admit that in the back of my mind I thought, who knows...maybe it will be better if he has a big bed.

Nope.

We started this process just after my last post, so I'll try to sum up the past 10 days of sleep angst in the most succinct way possible.

Basically, he didn't want to fall asleep on his own in the bed. He needed to be lulled, rocked, sang to, back-rubbed, magic spelled upon - whatever we could do to get him sleepy enough to put him down in the bed so he wouldn't get back up. If we didn't, we were in for an hour or two of the same looping roller coaster over and over and over again. And I like roller coasters. But this was enough to make me want to scream after 20 minutes.

So we took the easy way out. At the time it seemed like the only sensible option.

Now how many times have we said that to ourselves?

Turns out we have created a monster. Now I feel I need to preface this all by mentioning that we never had that many problems with our girls. My oldest fought the big bed for a week or two, but after our consistent "go back to bed" talk she gave in to our wisdom. And our younger daughter never even fought it. It was a non-event.

Nowadays, we just don't have the energy or time to do all head-to-head combat that we did with our oldest. Or so we thought. Now we are paying the price. Not only would he not go to sleep without us cuddling him into his slumber, he started waking up during the night and coming to get us. Twice each night.

Ugh. Now we were in a pickle.

He was so tired during the day after all his nighttime shenanigans that he started taking long naps. After a few days of this he was all ass-backwards with his sleep. He wasn't going to sleep at night until 9 or 9:15p, only to get up some time between midnight and 2am, and again around 4 or 5am, and then finally he was up for good at 6am. And then he'd take a 3 hour nap during the day.

Now I can't be positive since I've been so sleep deprived lately, but I'm pretty sure this a HUGE step backward in our sleep regimen. It's like we have a 3 month old again. And this boy has been sleeping through the night for almost 2 straight years with nary a peep.

Again with the Ugh.

After a tryst at 2am that lasted until 3:30am with both my husband and myself up trying to figure out what the hell we had done wrong to create this situation, I knew that something needed to change.

I started doing the math and figured out that he was sleeping about 11 to 12 hours every day. Which the doctor assured me at his 2 year well-check was perfectly normal. And she also happened to mention that he'd probably give up his nap sooner than his sisters, since boys usually give it up sooner than boys.

That was the only green light I needed to decide that we would once again forge ahead and start going without naps. Why not go back to the crib? Why not go back to the head-to-head combat and the nauseating "go back to bed" cycle? Because I am trying to outwit this little dude. Or at the very least outplay him.

My reasoning was that he would be so tired if he didn't take one that we could put him down around 7:30p and he would be way easier to get to sleep. And we wouldn't be dorking around with him until 9 at night. And hopefully he'd be so tired that he would sleep through the night again.

Now the moment of truth. You are all wondering, did that stroke of genius work? Or was she just so desperate that she tried something really stupid and she'll be voted out of her family?

So far, so good. Of course the first day we tried to skip the nap, on Sunday, he fell asleep in his car seat at 3pm before we even pulled out of the parking space we were in. We let him sleep an hour that day. Then on Monday he went without a nap. Monday night he went to bed at 7:30p and was, unfortunately, up at 2am. But just that once, so that was an improvement.

Yesterday he had another short snooze, but was easy to put down by 8pm, and stayed asleep until 4am. A marked improvement! Except he was up again at 5am, and then 6am for good. Once again, Ugh.

But I think we might be on to something. I think we will be able to outlast him at this point, since we have outwitted him for a few nights now and we can finally have the 8 to 9pm hour back to ourselves again.

Now on a related note, sadly, our younger daughter has gotten in the mix the past couple nights. When we had that ugly session I mentioned that lasted an hour and a half the other night, he was crying so much with us trying to put him back to bed over and over that she woke up and started crying too. Then this seemed to have reset her sleep cycle, and the past 2 nights she has been up at 2am. She wakes up, looks around, and then claims "it's too dark!".

Well duh. It's nighttime. But that bit of outwitting doesn't really work on a 4 year old in the middle of the night.

So last night I had a pep talk with her, which usually works when she goes into these cycles. I am determined to outwit her as well, and get some damn sleep around here.

It seems it hit home a bit, since she started talking to her sister this time when she woke up. She was complaining to her, hoping that her woes could still be heard, but that she wouldn't wake up my husband or myself as she had promised.

One point for her in the outwit department. She is a worthy adversary.

But I will not be outplayed and I will definitely outlast.