Fire Sale! Paid 15k, Will Settle for Half

Baby for Sale: 10 months, cute although no resemblence to mom, loves to feed self, squeal, and smiles when brother calls him, "the baby IN." No return policy for lack of sleep you and he will get.

I'll premise this by saying I do believe I passed my craptastic gene for sleep to both kids. As much as I have tried to enforce a reasonable bedtime, make allowances to be home for naps, encourage wind down activities before sleeping neither kid is a good sleeper.

I don't want either of my kids to be sleep meds dependent or get to a point where they just exist in a comatose lack of sleep state like mom. I know that when sleeps goes I am a real joy to be around and frankly that's when my mental state nose dives. Parenting comes with the expectation of crappy sleep. I am trying to make it a non-negotiable for myself no matter what I have to give up.

Ben is the lesser of 2 evils. He's outgrown the nap, but since they still do them at school he is often still wide open at bedtime. Luckily making the bath, book, day wrap up helps settle him down. If I had a playroom I could remove the ongoing stimulus of toys in the room.

Right now we are trying the "you are four, pick 2 books, an animal and one car." Anything else found in the bed goes to time out for a week. After 30 mins lights are dimmed to the point he can't read the books or see the car although, like his mother, he could talk on and on in the dark.

Ian. Good God almighty. This kid hates sleep. Even as early as last summer he would only take one nap a day no matter how much I tried. He's not always crying but talking, babbling, bouncing on the side of the crib squealing.

At present he takes one combined nap around noon to two on a good day. A bad day (like this entire week where he has refused all sleep except in the car) means he is up from 6/6:30am until 7/7:30 pm straight. I don't do late afternoon naps because frankly by 7 pm, going on 12 hours of childcare, I'm at the end of my rope. I want kids winding down, for Bill to get home, and honestly start working on all the home/school work that hasn't gotten down or only has little pieces finished between baby duty.

This would be why I work most nights until midnight or after to find time to catch up. Also I'm a night owl by nature who hits a 2nd wind about 11 pm and I have to MAKE myself call it and sleep.

So in my attempt to try to get him to sleep more (at all) during the day I'm going back to 1. trying to get him down earlier for some type of am nap. If this means not going to the gym, I can move the time or suck it up for the greater good. 2. We need to do a full on CIO. I went back today while he was screaming going on 45 mins to refresh my memory of the method.

Ben was at daycare and I frankly don't remember if he refused to nap like this. I do know that we went through a patch of waking up in the night as well as just not settling down at night. Total typical baby. For the middle of the night wakings we did CIO to get him back on pace.

Another glaring part to this situation is that if in the car for any amount of time, Ian falls asleep and it's damn near impossible to get any more sleep out of him. Hence the need to build more sleep into the day so he won't sleep in the car.

It would also help if I didn't live a good 20-30 mins away from EVERYTHING and EVERYONE. Even Target. Yes Target is not even close.

So added to the reasons we need to move, my kid needs to sleep.