Surviving the First Weeks of School

Ah, holiday weekends.  Labor Day was full of work around here. All kinds of work. Housework, construction work, parenting work.

 FFM is on a sleep strike and it's taxing our parenting skills to the max.  Is he stressed about school?  Is he strung out about piano lessons?  Did Dad being out of town the first week of school throw him for a loop? Is the new routine messing him up?  Our analysis leads us to believe he is testing boundaries, and pushing HARD to see how far he can go.

The end result is that FFM looks like the walking dead.  He's got dark circles under his eyes that rival black holes from Deep Space Nine with lovely violet accents. After a long weekend of trying multiple strategies we're having the most luck with super duper early bedtime.  This gives him enough time to mess around in bed before going to sleep that he actually a reasonable amount of sleeping done.  It's still not enough, though, as the circles are only getting worse. Top it off with the season's first cough/cold he just caught and I fear disaster before too long.

After getting enough sleep that he was finally lucid we chatted.  He's not worried about school.  He missed Dad last week but that wasn't it either.  Piano made him a little worried (he moved up to the next level several months early) but a good day of practice and he's feeling much better about that now.  Why no sleep?  The very blunt answer I finally got from him- it's boring and he doesn't want to do it anymore.

Ugh.  Annoying.  It's not fun to toe the line with your kid.  We did it, a kids got to sleep after all, but I want to  make him understand WHY he needs sleep.  I want him to WANT to go to sleep.  He makes all kinds of good choices on his own, so I thought about ways to align sleeping with those choices he already makes.

 Lately he's been on a anti-artificial color kick.  He doesn't choose a lot of snacks with artificial colors because they are bad for his brain (totally over simplified explanation, but it works for a 5 year old). By no means is this hard and fast, we/he have not eliminated artifical colors from his diet, but he ate a super bright sno-cone one day and wondered where the colors came from.  He didn't like the answer.  He likes doing "healthy" things and avoiding "not-healthy" things. *bling* little tiny bulb goes on over my head.

Today we discussed how sleep is healthy for you.  How missing out on sleep is just like putting unhealthy things into your body.  It's not punishment to go to bed, it's just like eating fruits and vegetables.  Then we put him in charge.  We told him how many hours of sleep his body required and we told him to figure out his own bedtime.  Voila, 7pm it is, and this time it's HIS choice, which apparently makes all the difference in the world.  No more bedtime dramas.  Shazam!