27 Apr The top 10 things that will wake up your sleeping child.

Oh the struggle.  The sun is setting, the bathtub is drained and the books have been read.  It is time.  It is time to ease your child to dreamland.  For me, the word ease should be replaced with force, plead with, or coerce, as there is nothing easy about putting Pi to sleep.  Once the miracle of sleep finally reaches your little one, the battle to keep them in lala land can be just as difficult.  It’s a bit more of a gut punch however, when some outside variable wakes up your child versus the fact that your child just can’t get to sleep for whatever reason.  Be it a midday nap interruption or an evening intrusion, my attempt to return Pi to slumber is always riddled with fear and anxiety. “What if I can’t get him back down? What if he only gets a 6 minute nap and he’s a raging mad tantruming toddler for the rest of the day?” Or, “What if my husband has to leave this movie we rented for more than 15 minutes to pat Pi back to sleep, and by the time he gets back I fall asleep? What if HE falls asleep while putting Pi back to bed?!!!”  All valid fears, all realistic outcomes.

Interruptions to your child’s sleep are frustrating and plentiful.  Some can be avoided, some, sadly can not.  I’ve compiled a list of the usual suspects below.

 

1. The Door

So you’ve rocked your child to sleep and managed to safely lay them down into his or her place of slumber.  Good job!  Oh, wait, let’s not get ahead of ourselves with a premature congratulatory remark, you’ve got one more hurdle to jump there champ.  The door.

Did you make it to the door without tripping over anything loud or crinkle-ish on the floor? Yes? Ok, that is step one.  Step two is opening the door.  Sounds easy enough.  Just open the door.  No, no, patience young grasshopper, you must first breathe, close your eyes, slow your pulse, and be one with the door.  Many things can trip up an unexperienced baby layer downer during the opening the door phase.

Are the doorknob joints rough and barbaric? Do you need to turn the handle slowly, and let the mechanism click gently into place?  Is there a pressure buildup from the AC, releasing a big whoooosh, once the seal is broken by opening the door?  Does the door creak?  Did you apply too much force in closing the door, thus creating a ricochet bang along the door frame?

These are all important things to consider when trying to escape and start the short, adult-portion of your long day.

 

 

2.  Garbage Trucks

If you drive, sit shotgun, ride along in the back, or otherwise find yourself on or around a garbage truck as your occupation, lemme just tell you right now, I salute you.  I appreciate you, I realize how unpleasant this experience must be, and I am grateful for you.  Thank you.

Thanks aside, I gotta say, I’m never pleased to hear you coming down the street when my kid finds himself in dreamy Lala land.  Not because I enjoy sitting in my own filth, but because I know it’s going to be a loud to-do.

There’s the clanking of all the crap, free-falling into the filth-mobile, and there’s the squeaking of the brakes.  I haven’t met a squeak-less garbage truck in all my years.  The garbage clanking probably can’t be avoided, so that’s just a scheduling issue, but the brakes?  Can we upgrade the brakes? Surely you’ve worn down to the rotors by now.   You know what Mr. OR Mrs. (this is 2018 after all) garbage truck person, you don’t even need to worry ‘bout it, you’ve got enough literal sh*t to deal with, let’s take this one up with corporate.

Oscar The Grouch Incorporated, will you please look into fixing the brakes on your service trucks?  I have a 15% brake resurfacing coupon from Goodyear, but it expires in 4 days so we really need to get a jump on this.

 

 

3.  Baby Toys

Maybe it’s karma for me not picking up my own playthings when I was a child.

Just like Beyonce says, what goes around comes back around… and what goes “BEEP BEEP, HELLO, LET’S PLAY!” at volume 11 because your pinky toe just grazed the twerp will probably wake your child up. So let’s go over the list of negligible misplaced toy culprits shall we?

There’s the lost block that you find by stepping on it, sending you to shriek with pain and involuntarily shout obscenities.  The toy car you kick that whizzes across the floor, bumping into the wall as it lands.  A rattle that gets accidentally punted across the wood floor, shaking rattling and rolling all the way.

In our household, the worst offender is this alphabet yelling, overly excited zebra that jolts to attention with even the slightest vibration near it’s over-anxious sonar.  I could be walking 8 feet away from it and it’ll spring into action.  It’s just so desperate for attention.

Oh, maybe I should just turn it off.  Duh, yes.  Oh, it skipped my mind while I was doing the million other things that being a mother demands.

I hate you zebra.

 

 

4.  Mail Carriers

Knock knock?

Who’s there?

Someone to wake your baby.

Someone to wake your baby who?

Someone to wake your baby because you ordered that awkward shaped globe on amazon two days ago and it couldn’t fit in your mailbox so now there’s someone knocking on your door when you just got the baby to sleep.

Hahahaha!  Good joke.

 

 

5.  Baby Music

We are too lazy to make a proper playlist for our child to fall asleep to, so we rely on other people’s poorly compiled selections from Spotify or Youtube to lull our boy to sleep.  The playlists aren’t that bad, really.  They’re relaxing, soothing, calming.  But every now and again, a rogue exuberant number will be peppered in among the legit lullabies, and throw a complete monkey wrench in operation ‘Baby Stay Asleep’.

Do the people who compile the lists even proof their playlists first? Do they even have kids?  Or do they think, “Hmm, the last 14 songs have been a little boring.  Let’s spice it up with a lively piece that’s really disjointed and jarring!  Perhaps this trumpet instrumental of Bjork’s greatest hits? Yes, perfect”.

Sure, I could find a new playlist, or make my own but 97.6% of the songs are great, so I’m content to just listen intently to the baby monitor and wait for the pissed-off trumpet”.

 

 

6.  Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

We live pretty close to a couple train tracks, an interstate, and a hospital that sometime welcomes helicopters delivering airlifted victims.

Let there be Motorcycles.  Let there be Motorcycle gangs, choo-choo’ing, heavy, house rattling freight trains, frap-frap-frappuccino’ing helicopters, road rage honking cars, and sputtering old jalopies.

Phew!

Pi you still asleep? No? Ok, be right there.

 

 

7. Lawn Care

Goodness knows I don’t wanna be out, mid-day in the hot sun cutting grass and trimming hedges, so I really don’t have the right to complain but, (here it comes anyway) would you mind, if it’s not too much trouble, can you please visit between the hours of 5:47pm and 6pm?  Unless my kid is sleeping at that time too, then maybe between the hours of never o’clock and not’gon’work-pm? Thanks.

We don’t even have lawn care folks, and yet the “vrrooooooooooooom” and the “blaatatatatatatatata” of mowers, choppers and blowers travel down the street and carry for miles in the wind.  Like a tray of fresh baked blueberry muffins in an open window that wafts its way under a passerby’s nose, beckoning him inside for a bite, only this is a black, death metal cloud of noise that infiltrates your ears, leaving them worn and sore. Ugh.

 

 

8. Loud Food

Fancy a bowl of popcorn with your chick flick?  Potato chips? Apple?

And if you’re blessed to not have a kitchen next to the room your kid sleeps in, I offer a sarcastic ‘congrats’ to you. You may skip to number 9.

As for the rest of you unlucky chumps, read on.

Cereal is the culprit in our house.  Got a hunkering for some Cap’t Crunch wild berry?  Great!  Do you also have an urge to interrupt your supposedly kid free evening with your spouse to go sing lullaby’s to your baby for another 20-30 minutes? No? Well then maybe you should skip the cereal.

I don’t know what it is with cereal (we really go ham for the cereal in our house for our bedtime snack), but it tends to wake the kid up when we eat it.  The whole thing sets you up for failure.  The rustling bag, the impact of the hard cereal pellets on your ceramic bowl, the clank scrapping of your spoon, collecting all that sugar laced cereal milk.

I think the way to solve this problem is to just fill your belly to the brink, right before the kid goes down for the night, so you won’t be tempted into having a midnight snack because you’ll want to vomit at just the thought of food.

 

 

9. Animals

I love dogs.  My son loves dogs.  I do not, however, love dogs while my son is taking a nap.  We do not have any pets, but that does not keep us immune from interruptions from our four legged friends.

Other animals make noise too.  Angry squirrels, obsessively meowing cats, cocaine snorting mocking birds, but there’s something to be said for a midday woof with a purpose.  It means business, and everyone, including your baby, needs to hear from Lassie about all the details behind Timmy’s fall down the well.

 

 

10.You

So you’ve got your little bundle of joy in your arms, their eyes heavy after an extended lullaby session, comfortably easing into Neverland, and then it happens. All attention rushes to your ankle as one million little invisible fuzzy feathers tickle your skin.  You my friend, have caught the death itch.

Did ya use your mind voodoo to shoo it away, only for it to return with vengeance, stronger and more intense than an itch has ever been in your entire life? “If…I…can just…reach that hanger….and use my toe to…to grab it and then…”  The fact that you can’t just be rid of it makes the itch that more insanely itchy, driving you to madness.  Like to the point where you’d black out and throw the baby on the floor to have the sweet satisfaction of ending the torture.  Just scratch the itch and reset the baby clock.

Charlie horse? Well that’s painful. Better fix that before you die.

Dead limb? Well why bring it back to life with blood flow anyway right? The pins and needles will subside and just turn to numb nothingness eventually.  You’re just a giant inert armchair at this point anyway so why not just let all your limbs atrophy into some romantic beauty and the beast furniture statue that just witnessed the last rose petal fall to the ground.  I digress.

Got a tickle in your nostril? A’choo? But you just spent 18 minutes rocking this kid to sleep. You really gonna risk it with a simple a’choo? Perhaps you can hold your breath just long enough to make an escape before the choo part of the a’choo happens. Well that’s a horrible plan. That’s one way to guarantee a really loud sneeze.

Hiccups? Burp? Cough? Pungent fart? It’s as if your own body is plotting against you to lengthen your bedtime purgatory sentence. I’d say thats a form of mutiny.

Oh and don’t forget the old cell phone drop to the face. So much regret. So much shame. Stupid slippery thing greased itself up and came outta nowhere! Totally not your fault. “Sorry baby, you ok?! Ok good now let’s reset the clock and get you back to sleep. Don’t tell daddy.”

 

Have any honorable mentions that really should’ve made the cut?  What wakes up your sleeping child?   Let me know in the comments!