Sleep Struggles

After ten months straight of Ethan sleeping through the night (starting right after his ear tube surgery last February), he's been waking up multiple times a night for the past couple of weeks. I'm not sure whether the sleep interruptions were precipitated by our traveling and abnormal sleeping arrangements, or if perhaps his tubes have come out and he has an ear infection again. I'm taking him to the doctor this morning to eliminate (or confirm) the ear possibility.

Whatever the reason for all the night wakings (and him getting up for the day before 5:30 am, no matter how late his bedtime is), Marcus and I are starting to feel like parents of a young baby again! In the past two weeks, we've done the middle-of-the-night rocking and patting, we've brought him into our bed, and we've let him cry for periods of time, all in an effort to get him to go back to sleep in the middle of the night. Only, this time around, it is even harder because he can argue with us, and he says the most heart-rending things from his crib. He's developed a fear of shadows (thanks to big brother), and he's always pointing at the shadows around his room and saying "I SCARED!" MONSTER!" Whenever anyone mentions or makes a move toward putting him in his crib for bed, he starts crying and wailing "I SAAA--AAADD!" This is such a dramatic change from the little boy of past months who used to ask to go bed when he was tired. He loved his bedtime routine and he went contentedly into his crib after books and rocking, talked to himself for a little while, and fell asleep without a protest. Now he BEGS to sleep in our bed or Caleb's bed every night. Marcus does not sleep well at all when either child is in our bed, so Ethan sleeping in our king with us on a regular basis is not really an option.

We've tried three times putting him to bed with Caleb in Caleb's queen-sized bed. The first two times, they just talked and played and eventually got too rowdy, so we separated them back into their own rooms. Last night, I did their bed time routine together in Caleb's room, and then I laid down in between them in Caleb's bed, and we all fell asleep together. I woke up around 10:30 and slipped out of bed, and the boys slept on until Ethan woke up at 5:30. Marcus said he heard Ethan wake up once, but he went back to sleep without any parental help. We would love it if the boys would get used to sleeping in the same room. Our best friends have 3-year-old triplets who share a room, and when we are over there, Marcus and I love hearing their kids talk to each other in the monitor before they fall asleep each night. Chatting before sleep is such great bonding time, and hopefully our boys will be old enough to handle sharing a room very soon.