Sleeping for spite

It is always when you least expect it that you get exactly what you want. No, I'm not talking about that BS myth that when you stop looking for true love it finds you. That's mythology promoting mental illness. What I'm talking about is meeting goals of parenting. My example comes from last evening. I'd given Dev the obligatory 15 minutes more than his younger brother at bedtime. This actually is for me more than being a gift of being older. If they go to bed at the same time they keep each other up, but if we allow his brother 15 minutes upstairs alone, he drops off nicely and Dev usually can fall right to sleep too. I know, I'm manipulative.

Last night when his 15 minutes were up, he decided that he WOULD NOT go to bed. He tried to butter me up. "Mom, I want to beeeee with you." When that didn't work he just got mad. He went to his room and kicked the walls, sure to wake his brother so I called him back down. We had a very sincere discussion about why trying to sleep in the living room while mom did her grown up stuff never works. And he protested that I was wrong. "Dev," I said. "What am I supposed to do here? Either you are going to go up there and ruin your brother's sleep so he will have a bad day tomorrow, or you'll stay down here and ruin your own sleep so you will have a bad day tomorrow." At this point honestly, I didn't expect for anything to go well at all. One thing you know about having a child with a mood disorder is that this stuff which is a small hurdle for some families is a major event for you. He looked at me and crossed his arms and harumphed.

"I guess I'll just have to SHOW YOU." And with that, he grabbed a blanket and a pillow, curled up in a ball in his play tent and within 5 minutes was softly snoring...very possibly the first time a child has ever gone to sleep just to spite his mother. Okay, probably not, there are a lot of moms and children out there, but still.