It Has Come Back to Haunt Me.....

So today was chalked up to the old adage, when you have so much to do that your brain starts flipping around in its shell, take a minute, grab an ice tea and blog.

I'm pretty sure that sleep deprivation is half of my problem, which kind of makes me feel like I'm walking around my house in a drunken haze. (And you say, what's wrong with that??? - Shame on you)

You know how when people have a new baby and it's all wonderful, except for the fact that they are awakened from REM sleep three times a night? Well, I was never really much into sleep deprivation, which is why Kaydn was a child of the Ferber Method. What's the Ferber method you ask? It's the method in which the entire family gets a wonderful night sleep, minus the screaming baby "soothing himself to sleep."

"Okay, here's the plan, we'll nurse him, change him, don't make eye contact and walk out the door," was the most often heard conversation in the middle of the night in our bedroom.

Yep, I'm a "let him cry it out" kind a parent. Hubby almost developed hives with all the screaming, but I'd usually be able to simply roll over and pull the covers over my head.

Throw stones all you want, but I bet if you counted all the hours of sleep I've had in the last four years, and the hours of sleep you may have had, you'll probably find a significant difference, and I bet I'm the winner.

But that seems to have bit me in the butt during the last month. Bladder control seems to the biggest problem we've encountered during this whole child rearing thing. Don't ask me how a kid who's been potty trained since he was two-years-old can't seem to shake the at-night-pull ups.

Well, last month I had had enough. The pull ups are gone, which resulted in more money spent on cleaning sheets than I had ever spent on pull ups in a month. And I'm pretty sure the rain forests didn't appreciate it either.

So, I thought of a plan. Kaydn Rye can take a two hour nap and not wet the bed, so I thought maybe waking him up every two hours during the night for potty breaks would seal the deal on our pull up free lifestyle.

So, every two hours I wake up to "BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP" and haul myself into Kaydn Rye's room, get him out of bed with a shovel, carry his 50 pound self into the bathroom, get him on the toilet and hopefully his half asleep self doesn't fall over on my bathroom floor.

I will give him some credit, we are now down to waking up every three hours, at 3 and 6, but I haven't had a night of uninterrupted REM sleep in more than a month, and I think I may morph into some kind of nasty bridge troll.

But I thought I had found a solution and it involved hubby's obsession with phones.

Hubby is absolutely obsessed with phones.

Yes, phones.

I guess maybe it's because we have zero big screen televisions, game boy systems (or whatever they're called now), or fast race cars. He's gotta have something to make his life worth living.

Last night at about midnight, when I would have liked to have been sleepy sleepy by the way, he proceeds to show me all his wonderful phone features.

His phone will even tell him what's currently on the screen so he doesn't even have to attempt at reading it. How wonderful is it that not only has my husband's very minimal vocabulary dwindled to almost nil over the course of our seven years (it is seven years, right?), but now he barely reads.

But anyway, that's a whole other life problem. So I had a great idea. What if we could set a message that said something like "Kaydn go potty. Kaydn go potty. Kaydn go potty," and set it to go off at 3 o'clock in the morning?

Well, the closest thing we could come up with was for Brandon to label my phone as "Kaydn go potty," and for me to call Brandon's phone at 3 o'clock. We put the phone on Kaydn Rye's bed and at 3 o'clock in the morning the lady in the phone said, "Kaydn go potty," instead of "Kate calling."

Granted, I still had to wake up at 3 o'clock, but all I had to do was whip my arm over to the nightstand and hit the call button.

And in case you're wondering, my wonderful plan did not work. I thought maybe he'd wake up and scream "Mom, there's someone talking in my room telling me to go potty," and all I'd have to do was scream back, "Yeah, I know, go potty." And then go back to sleep.

But he didn't even move when the phone went off. I had that thing set so high that even I could hear it in the next room, and he didn't even roll over. He didn't make a peep.

We're back to the drawing board.




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