This is what he looked like when I had to drag him away from the computer to take a nap this afternoon.
Image still: The Exorcist
A friend of mine has had a lot of trouble getting her 2-year-old to sleep. In posting some ideas to help her on Facebook, she said that I should start a mommy blog and write about bed time issues.
Funny thing is that we still have them all the time, so I want to laugh when she says that my advice helps. Meanwhile, I’m pulling my hair out with every naptime or bedtime we go through.
The latest bedtime woe is that Big A says he’s afraid of the dark. He’s never been afraid of the dark, and his room really isn’t that dark, but now he cries and yells for us for at least 30 minutes after lights-out every night.
A few months ago he was afraid of monsters, so I invented “monster spray” by putting a little lavender essential oil in water and drawing a “no monster” sign on it. At bedtime, we would spray his room and tell him that monsters hated the smell and would stay away. And it wouldn’t hurt that lavender helps relax people for sleep and just plain smells yummy, right?
That worked for a while, but then he became scared of shadows. So we would have to show him — with the lights on — that nothing was in the closet, under the bed, behind Little A’s diaper pail, under the shoe baskets, etc. Then when the lights were out, we showed him the same things. We moved them this way or that so he could see that the shadows were, indeed, from the item and not a lurking monster.
But over the last few days, he’s become afraid again and insists that we leave all kinds of lights on. Little A wants nothing of it. He wants the lights OUT so he can sleep. This leads to much contention and yelling at each other back and forth. So I went off to the store in search of new nightlights.
I found one that plugs into the outlet for power-outage emergencies. Yea! It comes on automatically and is like a flashlight that he’ll be able to carry around. But the really cool one is a monster.
Yes, a monster light to protect Big A from monsters! Genius!
It’s a happy monster by day and a scary green-glowing monster by night.
Happy monster by day
Scary monster by night
Scary enough to scare away monsters. But not so scary that it frightens the wee beast.
Good monster. Good.