...the lion sleeps tonight...

Last night CR managed to practically stay up later than we did.

He has been getting into the habit of staying up and playing in his bed for nearly an hour after he goes down for his afternoon nap - this pushes his actual shut-eye time out an hour, and in turn, his wake-up time out an hour. So basically the lad crashes from 3:30pm - 6pm, and then once we get him into bed for nite-nite time at 8:30pm, he repeats the play action and sometimes stays up past 10pm. Notice the trend? It's not good. He's an annoying little jungle creature up there, crashing his cars, and repeatedly roaring down to his enslaved parents to retrieve any vehicles that have jumped out of his bed.

I suppose we sort of established the rocky foundation in this flawed structure. In order to keep his toys contained within a relatively portable vessel, we piled all of his bedtime pals into a bucket.

You may remember this multi-faceted canister when it served as a hat for CR...

Rather than sitting with him and having him select a few choice cars or trains to keep with him at night, at one point awhile back we handed him the entire felt bee tub - we told him to keep the ones he wanted, and to throw those he didn't onto his floor...not the smartest set of parental instructions.

Instead of tossing the rejects down gently to the rug below, the little menace has taken to hurling the sedans at the door, the far wall, the bookcase...basically with every forceful toss, the little guy is further depreciating the value of our home by adding little nooks and crannies all over the room...a habit we are aiming to break for more reasons beyond the initial problem of his mounting sleep deprivation...

After finally nodding off last night, you can only imagine how tired the little man was this morning when it came time to actually get up and go to school. Apparently he rose briefly before it was time to get up this morning, and in order to avoid waking the heartburn-laiden woman in the next room, B climbed into bed with wee-man, and the pair proceeded to snooze until 8am...

This isn't the first time the father-son team has shared a pillow...

Around the time that we usually leave the house for school was when CR made his way down the stairs for his hot cereal fix...thank goodness it was PJ day in his classroom, as it made getting dressed a whole lot smoother and less of a battle...going from PJs to PJs is an easy case to make.

Tonight he only screamed out once. At that point, we threatened to shut his door and take away all of his buddies, and he wasn't heard from again.

Hopefully he is on a path to a normal sleeping pattern. I put him down earlier for his afternoon nap, and the last peep we heard from his room tonight was 9pm. Tomorrow he is going to accompany me to my 32 week appointment - he'd better be up and at 'em when I go into his room in the morning, and his wrecking-ball cars had better not done too much damage...