An unlikely remedy for insomnia

As many of you know, Lucas has never been a great sleeper.  For whatever reason(s), he just never seemed to go to bed well or stay in bed well.  He is now 14 months and Scott and I have tried every method known to man to get him to sleep through the night.  Now some experts say sleeping through the night is 6 hours and yeah I get that but going to bed at 8 pm and waking up at 2 am ready to play is just not acceptable in my book.  I am not sure what those experts say you should do after 6 hours but it never seemed to matter what we did, Lucas just didn’t want to go back to sleep.

Now as many of you also know, I love sleep.  I mean I really love it.  I can take a nap anywhere and sleep for a solid two hours and wake up feeling refreshed and ready for anything that comes my way.  So needless to say, Lucas’s lack of and my love of sort of conflicted.  This left me feeling, well truthfully, like a failure.  I mean how can I do anything energetically with Lucas if I get only a few hours of broken up sleep per night.  And to top it off, I started wondering how in the world we could have more than 1 child if I am never getting sleep.

Over the past few months we have noticed that Lucas pulls his hair out.  I don’t believe it is any disorder or caused by anxiety but I do believe he does it out of frustration, lack of communication, exhaustion and/or hunger.  Then we started wondering, is it possible that he is pulling his hair out while he is sleeping and waking himself up?  So last night, while over at my parent’s-in-law, we took out the clippers and gave Lucas a summer buzz cut.

Now it may have been a whole host of other reasons, but for whatever reason, Lucas slept through the night last night.  We have created a new bedtime routine so I imagine it is going to take a few nights to get use to that but overall it was an awesome night.  The most fantastic part was that Lucas slept until 5:30 am without interruption and I believe he would have slept longer had he not peed through his diaper, pjs and sheets.

Praise the Lord and we will continue praying that this is the beginning of a new era of good night’s sleep and no more hallucinating mommy.