I have officially gone to the dark side. No, dear neighbors to our left, I am not beating my child, we’re just going through the first night of crying it out and all the fun that entails. As you have a 20 month old and I occasionally hear the same angry squawks emanating from your house in the evening hours, I’m thinking you’ll cut me some slack and not be so quick to dial Child Protective Services.

Seriously internet, I really do feel terrible that it has come down to this ugly brutal way of getting someone to sleep, but alas, I fear that after a year and a half of crappy sleep patterns, I have just had enough. That’s it. No more. I have given every other method a fair try and all with the same end result.

So tonight, with the best of intentions, someone is crying more in the space of two hours than they ever have before. Part of me wants to just give up and go in there and make it stop. I know that wouldn’t be beneficial for either of us, so it’s 12:12 am and I’m still up, still listening to someone angrily cry and thankful that there’s cold Mountain Dew in the house.

Wish us luck internet, we’re going to need it.

You know it’s going to be a banner week when you kick things off bright and early Monday morning by getting to work and discovering that some of the contents of someone’s nasty diaper got on your pants when Owen fought the first diaper change of the day like an angry badger and that mystery poop smell that you couldn’t figure out where it was coming from? It was you all along.

I know I haven’t talked about it in a while, but alas, bedtime is still an ugly thing in our household. Parts, such as the actual putting of Owen to bed (the first time), have improved drastically. All I have to say is, “Time for Bed” and he happily (okay, so some nights it’s not so happily, but he still willingly goes on his own regardless) trots off to his room, where we go through the bedtime ritual. The part that is still so frustrating and aggravating is two or three hours later when he wakes up and refuses to go back down until he’s nursed and in my bed. I don’t even care that he’s in my bed–we’ve co-slept from the very beginning and that’s not the problem. The problem is that when he wakes up after the two or three hour interval where he’s sound asleep, that it sometimes takes upwards of an hour (or longer on a really bad night that causes me to hiss through clenched teeth that he will SO be an only child) to get him good and sound asleep again. We’ve worked many months to try and convince Owen that really, he is a big boy and he can go to sleep without anyone else and it will be okay to no avail. I love him (as does my husband) beyond words, but sometimes there are things that must be done (like homework or design work for clients) that just can’t be interrupted constantly and at almost 19 months, the pint-sized ruler of our house needs to come to the realization that sleeping for a four or five-hour stretch for the first part of the night is better all around for everyone’s mental health and well-being.

Tonight was shaping up to be another one of those nights, where I fondly remember the days when I was single and wondered if I was ever going to get married but by golly, I got to manage my evening time the way I wanted to on a regular basis (that and kick my past self for not fully appreciating the freedom I had…but I digress). Exasperated at 10pm because I’d already rocked someone (I thought) to sleep for over a half hour on two separate occasions earlier in the evening, with things that HAD to be done tonight, I gave Owen the ‘mom’ look over the top of my glasses, sternly pointed my finger directly at him and told him in a firm (but not mean or loud) voice that he was NOT to move (he’s in our bed) and he was to go directly to sleep. Then I tucked the blanket around him, kissed him and told him I loved him, and went out of the room, closing the door almost all the way behind me. I totally expected to hear wails of protest coming out the the room almost immediately…and when two minutes and then five minutes went by with not even a peep, I had to quietly inch up to the crack of the door and see what was going on. Lo and behold, SOUND ASLEEP. The best part? Here it is almost an hour and a half later and he’s still sound asleep.

All those times when I’ve shushed and rocked and rubbed someone’s back for 40 minutes just to get 20 minutes of peace? I should have been pulling out the mom look of death and finger of doom all along.