Sleep Wonderful Sleep

Those are the words I'm longing to say. As many of you know, we've pretty much always struggled with Hannah's sleep and how to teach her to go to sleep and stay asleep. We had high hopes for her weighted blanket and while it does seem to have helped some, it has not been the miracle we had been hoping for. Besides having a sleep study done, the developmental pediatrician recommended that we try melatonin an hour before bedtime. I've been reluctant to go out and buy it (it's an over the counter supplement that your body makes naturally anyway) because I just hate the thought of having to give Hannah anything even remotely close to medicine if I can help it, but this week pretty much sealed the deal. I'm willing to try it and I went out and bought some today. Not only has Hannah been having trouble falling asleep, but she's not been sleeping through the night again either. She's been waking up between 2-4 times a night crying. She's obviously tired and cranky throughout the day because she's not getting a restful night's sleep and this makes her much less able to cope with her other challenges. Last night for example she was up a total of 3 times. She also got to bed late because of church. Thankfully she pretty much went right to sleep. Then today she had preschool and then her friend Addie came over. There were some really great moments to their play date, but also some really rough ones. Twice Hannah hit Addie when there was unwanted physical contact and several other times she went into hysterics when Addie disrupted her lining up of Little People, tried to interrupt her petting of the cat, or did not want to play with her pattern blocks in the "right" way. Normally there are a few incidents each play date, but nothing quite this rough. The hitting of other kids is definitely a newer development that I am not pleased about. On a positive note, we have both the sleep study and her psychologist appointment scheduled. The sleep study is next Tuesday and the psychologist is March 5th. I'm glad the sleep study is so soon because we so need some help. I'm not looking forward to the actual study though. I don't think it's going to be a fun night. I've had a sleep study so I know what all it entails and frankly I'm a bit skeptic about how they intend to keep all the electrodes on Hannah and keep her in the bed. I know this is a pediatric sleep clinic and it's what they do, but still. I'll believe it when I see it! It should be interesting to say the least.

For some reason Hannah has picked up the word "bummer" from somewhere (I'm not sure where) and has been using it quite frequently and in the proper context. I'm sure I've said it before since I grew up during the word's heyday, but I don't use it regularly so I'm not thinking she'd have heard it enough from me to truly understand what it means. Obviously she's heard it somewhere and often enough that she's inferred it's meaning quite adequately. Two of my favorite incidences of her using the word both happened this week. They may not sound as funny written out as they did in person, but I've got to put them on here anyway so bear with me. The first time she was pretending to leave a message on one of her phones for her friend Addie's mom. The message I heard her leave was this, "Hi Kim! How's Addie? Is she still coughing? Poor thing. That's a bummer. Bye." The second time was just yesterday. Our kitchen floor was a little wet from melting snow and therefore slippery. Our old dog, Abby, came trotting around the corner and slipped. Her back end went right out from under her and she fell to the ground. Hannah saw it happen and turned to me and said in a concerned tone of voice that was almost fake, "Aww, Abby fell. What a bummer." I had to bite my lip to keep from cracking up laughing at that one. You probably had to be there to know how funny it was. I think it was the tone of voice that did it for me.