A R {f} O {u} CKING NIGHTMARE

Last night in our household could easily be noted as the Night From Hell, by any standards.  It started easily enough with two lovely toddlers who enjoyed entire dinners and played nicely with each other in the living room.  The only mishap, which is bound to happen with a two and three year-old, was one hitting incedent involving Little Rocker, Monkey Man, Daddy, and a toy spoon. 

See...Little Rocker accidentally threw his toy mixing spoon in the garbage when tossing out a tissue.  I pulled it out and told him Daddy was going to wash it for him and give it back.  This was apparently not good enough for Little Rocker who yelled at RJ, "Daddy, dats MY spoon - GIVE IT BACK!!!"  I told Little Rocker that Daddy was just washing his spoon but he was still upset that he couldn't have it right away so he ran over to Monkey Man and hit him.  Completely out of nowhere, poor Monkey Man never had a chance.  This was understandably a huge surprise to Monkey Man, who had been playing with a bouncy ball and had no clue what was transpiring in the kitchen.  So there we had two crying toddlers - one was crying because his spoon was being cleaned and he knew he'd just done a naughty thing, the other was crying because his brother had come out of nowhere and smacked him for no reason.

Thankfully, that died down quickly.  Little Rocker eventually apologized...after insisting for a bit that "No, Monkey NOT sad, I sad!"  Once again all was calm in our home.  Little Rocker passed out on the living room floor while we were getting Monkey Man ready for bed and from then on bedtime went off without a hitch.

Sadly, that ended around 12:30 am.

Little Rocker woke up and got us at that time to go potty.  No big deal - he's been doing that lately and I actually welcome that. The thing is that he didn't actually need to go potty, so after about 15 minutes we told him he'd have to go back to bed and changed his nighttime diaper.  This produced a huge tantrum and screams of wanting to "sit on the POTTYYYYYYY!!!!!"  We told him to sleep because he was very tired and said he could sit on the potty later if he needed to.

There was maybe another hour or hour and a half of sleep that RJ and I got in before Little Rocker woke up again.  The rest of the night produced tantrum after tantrum.  We finally realized around 2:30 that he may be afraid of the dark, which I know can happen to kids his age, so we promised to get a nightlight for him tomorrow so it wouldn't be too dark in his room.  The poor little guy just kept saying "No, it's too dark!  It's too dark in my rooom!  I need a light onnnn!"

This really broke my heart...

I couldn't find any of our soft bulbs {I know we have very low wattage bulbs somewhere that can be used in his bedroom lamp}, because it was the middle of the night and I couldn't think straight, so RJ got the LED flashlight and we gave it to Little Rocker.  We told him that the flashlight could be his nightlight for tonight and he seemed ok with that, so we tucked him back into bed and crawled back into ours.

At 4:00 am, Little Rocker was up for the day.

He woke up in a tantrum about breaking the string on his flashlight.  He was very distraught and wanted RJ to fix it, but it could not be fixed unfortunately because it was actually broken.  No big deal to us but for a picky toddler apparently a very big deal!  This made the tantrum worse and it went on and on.  RJ told Little Rocker to hop back into bed and he did but he was still upset.  There were fits on and off from then and I finally just went in to see if snuggling would get him to sleep around 6:00. 

Seeing as we all needed to be up for the day shortly after that it didn't make much difference, so Little Rocker was up eating cereal and watching Sesame Street {all snuggled on the couch} by 6:45 this morning.

Whoop-dee-doo!

The good that came from this whole debacle?  I got two loads of laundry done before 8:00 am.  Monkey Man's breakfast was ready and waiting on the kitchen table well before the little dude was even awake.  RJ and I were out the door earlier than usual {ish}.

I suppose the morning was ok.  My only regret is not working out, but there was no way I was going to be able to do that with Little Rocker up.  I suppose we made it and we're on to a new day!