Successfully Sleep Trained

Unfortunately, it's that Simon has successfully sleep trained me to be up at 5am. Seriously 5am is a bit much. The hard part is that he wakes up in a perfectly great mood and all a chatter about who is sleeping, which car they will be driving today and what he may be eating for breakfast. I decided that that is just when his body wakes up and I should embrace watching the sun rise together. But honestly, 6am would be freaking awesome. In the grand scheme of things, we can't complain. About 4 weeks ago Simon started sleeping through the night (if you consider getting up at 5am "the night") and we've only maybe gotten out of bed in the middle of the night 3 times since then. He is pretty good about falling asleep quickly without argument and we've moved onto tucking him in and walking out while he's awake. There are times he cries but generally speaking is ok with it. But lets be honest, 5am is a killer. Luckily a friend borrowed me the genius toddler alarm clock that glows when the child is allowed to get out of bed. Mind you, this is a friend I work with and she may have just been alarmed about the giant black circles forming under my eyes:) But honestly it's pretty amazeballs. Simon latches onto rules and routines and once we showed him the purpose of the alarm clock he seems to "get it". We set the clock to glow at 6am. He has also randomly slept a little later recently and even woke up one day at 6:06 so the clock was already glowing. All I heard was "Mommy...glow". WONDERFUL! I'd love to get you out of bed then. During a recent 2:30am wake-up Steve was able to remind him that he needed to wait for it to glow and he went back to bed, no argument. Today he woke up at 5:40 and we allowed him to chat to himself happily until 5:55. We even heard him talking to himself about "glow" but no screaming for us (or if we're being honest:), me). At 5:55 Steve went in to practice 'wake-up' to the glow with him since we didn't want to risk him losing it by the time it was glowing. All was well and I overheard Simon's fascination with the "glow" on the monitor. It's kinda hilarious. But really, I'm still waking up at 5am and then I lay awake wondering when he's going to wake up, so I need to get over that.

In somewhat related sleep news I verbally accosted some teenagers this week. O. M. G. Seriously was tired and getting to bed early one night when I hear a bomb go off in our driveway. Scared the H-E-double hockey sticks out of me. Like, house shook and I jumped. My mind flashed "Is Simon going to wake up?" I hear nothing. Second bomb goes off and I hear, "Mommy!" AHHH are you freaking kidding me?!? It's like 9:45 and I am raging. Simon seemed to have just yelled in his sleep because I didn't hear anything else so I figured I needed to stop the madness before it really woke him up. So I marched out the door like a crazy person, in my pj's without shoes on to realize that the fireworks are going off across the street in a park. I see some neighbors across the street are also in their driveway. I've never spoken to them in the 7 years we've lived here but I choose today to yell, "Well I'm going to yell at them for waking up my 2-year-old". Yes I realize I just wrote that Simon wasn't really awake but that didn't seem quite as dramatic as needed for first time neighborly exchanges. Up until this point our relationship has consisted of me spying on the neighbor husband's OCD from our front window. I'm guessing I'm not the only one in our neighborly relationship monitoring for mental illness symptoms now. As I'm marching towards the park I realize I have no idea what I'm going to say about the situation. Once there it came to me and I yelled into the darkness "DO YOU HAVE A PERMIT TO BE LIGHTING FIREWORKS IN THIS PARK? THERE ARE CHILDREN SLEEPING!". I had no idea if this made sense but I saw shadows of bodies running. I marched back into the house to find my rational counterpart folding laundry. Here is the conversation:

S: Did you yell at them?

Me: Yes I yelled at them.

S: What did you say?

Me: I said "DO YOU HAVE A PERMIT TO BE LIGHTING FIREWORKS IN THIS PARK!". No idea if that makes sense.

S: Ah, yeah. Fireworks are totally illegal. You could have called the cops

Me: (so it did make sense!) Oh yeah.

I didn't actually want to get anyone in trouble, I wanted the fireworks to stop so Simon didn't wake up. But don't be fooled. If it happens again I will totally call the cops. Just ask our other neighbor whose dog bit Gretzky. I let it go once but the second time they had that dog off a leash and it went after Gretzky, animal control was definitely called. Update: That dog's always on a leash and there have been no more fireworks. You're Welcome Neighborhood.

Don't mess with my babies.