A Team Week 75: Staycation

A Team Week 75 was our vacation week, so only the last two days of it was spent at home where we enjoyed a Staycation in our cozy Cape Cod to recover from the exhaustion of a week of vacationing.

In my final post about our Winter Getaway, I mentioned how I had prepared myself for "The Big One"...a huge fit from Asher that never happened.  I had assumed he would pitch a fit at some point due to his exhaustion and disappointment that our time in Florida was over, but it didn't happen...or so I thought.

While Asher was quite agreeable the entire day and never threw a fit as we left Florida and headed back to Wisconsin, the time did come...when it was least unexpected.  I thought we had made it.  I thought all was well and was so proud of how well behaved the kids had been.  That is when everything hit the fan and changed.  That is when "The Big One" came...and it.was.EPIC!

Before I explain what happened though, I feel the need to backtrack and shed some insight on the not-so-fun that had been going on (prior to and) during our vacation.  For over a year now, we have had difficulty putting Asher to bed.  As he gets older, he is getting more and more aware of his independence and distaste for bedtime.  He is never really a fan of going to bed and despite the fact that he is a highly agreeable kid 99% of the time, the other 1% typically comes out at bedtime.  Now, he hasn't been terrible at going to bed for the entire last year, but we have had our difficult nights and have worked on dealing with them as much as possible.  In the last few months though, it seems to have gotten worse.  If he thinks he is unfairly being sent to bed, he will just scream and cry, while we can feel our blood pressure rising.  We tried everything we could think of to make this easier and read all sorts of suggestions online, but nothing really seemed to help.  As our vacation approached, it seemed things got even worse.  The night before we left for Florida, I was at my wits end as he continued to pull this crap and wouldn't let me do what I needed to do to finish getting everything ready for us to go.  I had hoped that it wouldn't be so bad once we got to Florida.  I'd hoped that he would be so exhausted from days full of fun in the sun that he'd practically be begging to go to sleep. We weren't so lucky.  Instead, almost every night while we were in Florida was a huge struggle at bedtime, and Asher seemed to recognize that all four of us sleeping in the same room made it even easier for him to find ways to be difficult and harder for us to find ways to deal with it.

We tried putting Asher and Avery down at the same time at first, and things would seemingly be going well.  When we put Avery into his crib though he would cry for a second as he often does and then Asher would start crying that he doesn't like Avery crying.  Asher would also insist that we stay in his room and that all the lights stay on, which didn't work because there was no way Avery would go to sleep if we were in there or if the lights were on and he could look around.  After a few days of dealing with this, we tried to switch things up.  We would put Avery to bed earlier and let him fall asleep while Asher was allowed to stay up another half hour or so to watch a movie or read stories with Gramps.  The deal was that he could stay up as long as he went into his room quietly afterward and went to sleep without waking Avery.  Again, no luck.  One night, we thought we had had success when Avery was already asleep and Asher quietly went to bed.  Then a few minutes later, Asher came out of the room crying to us that he didn't like to hear Avery crying (he was fast sleep and not making a sound).  We tried to reason with him that Avery was sleeping and not making any noise, so he should go back to bed before Avery wakes.  Then we realized that was his newest strategy.  He continued to argue with us and get louder and louder until Avery was awake and crying and the entire process could start all over again!!!

So, that is how the week went and Eric and I were both very excited to get back home and have three separate rooms for everyone to sleep in.  We landed at the airport in Milwaukee, collected our luggage from baggage claim and then Asher, Avery and I waited while Eric went to get our van.  A little while later, Eric returned and we loaded all of our luggage and the boys into the van.  As I worked to get Asher buckled into his seat, a switch flipped and my agreeable little boy turned it a crazed little monster.  At this point, it was after 9pm CST and he had only had about a 30 minute nap all day (being awake the other 16.5 hours of the day).  As I was buckling him in he asked me if he could watch a movie before bed when we got home, like he had done with Gramps during the week.  I told him it was getting really late, and that we were all heading straight to bed when we got him.  He didn't like that and proceeded to kick and scream in his seat from the airport all the way past Racine.  Finally, we started to hear him trying to say something through his screams and I told him that if he wanted us to understand him he needed to stop crying and screaming.  He calmed down enough so that we could understand him say "I need help."  Then he began to scream and cry again as he told us what he needed help with.  Again, I said that he needed to stop so we could understand him and then we were able to make out "I'm stuck".  I turned around in my seat to see what he was talking about and found that in his crazed fit he had unbuckled himself in his carseat and gotten himself tied up in the straps!!  Eric quickly pulled over so that I could get him safety back into his seat as I quietly thanked God that nothing had happened to us while he'd been unbuckled.  Then, he pleaded with me to sit by him, but with the present state of the van I could not, so instead I held his hand the rest of the way home.  When we arrived home, he asked again if he could watch a movie and again wasn't happy that I said no, but by now most of the fight had gone out of him.  We went into his room and got him ready for bed and then I laid down with him until he fell asleep.  Two minutes later he was out and I headed up to bed myself, ready for a good night of sleep in my own bed, and sleep we did.

My boys enjoying a relaxing morning together on Saturday.

We enjoyed a relaxing morning together and looked forward to nap time as we were all still tired.  That it was when "The Big One" returned.  Although everyone was tired, Asher was not as excited about taking a nap as the rest of us.  He put up a fight, but it wasn't bad at first.  I got him into bed and headed up to bed myself.  That is when he started screaming and crying again and when I heard his little brother start to cry after being woken up as well, I flipped.  I was so sick of dealing with this.  Typically, I work hard not to yell or scream at the boys, but I couldn't contain myself this time.  I wasn't going to put up with this any more and I quickly began to pull all of Asher's buddies, books and bookcase out of his room, telling him that he could earn them back a little at a time as he deserved them.  Prior to this, I'd been thinking about trying to instill some sort of reward system, but hadn't actually thought of the idea I ended up using, but I am happy to report it worked.  It has been over two weeks since this time and Asher now has all of his buddies back in his room and has earned back about 1/3 of his books (3 at a time for every bedtime he goes down without any fits/trouble).  We have only had one or two nights that he was difficult and when he realized that we would just take his books away again and start all over, it ended fairly quickly.  Now, I'm hoping we've turned a corner, but with a three-year-old, one can never know for sure.

Avery enjoying the snowblower despite the lack of snow.  The temperature in Kenosha after we got home was only a few degrees cooler than it was down in Florida at the same time!

The boys coloring nicely together at the table.

Asher's empty bookcase.

After nap time on Saturday, the rest of the weekend went very well for the most part.  We had a relaxing time together as a family and caught up on the rest we needed.  Sunday night though, did take a turn for the worse shortly before bed, but this time Asher wasn't the issue.  After dinner that night Asher asked to have an apple.  Eric began to cut it up for him while I was working on cleaning up the house and putting all of our stuff away that we'd taken to Florida.  Then I heard Eric ask me to come to the kitchen.  When I did, I found that he had sliced the tip of his thumb off while cutting Asher's apple.  I always thought of myself as a pretty tough person when it comes to blood, but helping Eric with his thumb while it gushed blood and then throwing away the chunk of skin sitting on the counter almost did me in.  By the time our vacation and then staycation were over, I was pretty much ready to begin A Team Week 76, go back to work and get back to our normal way of life.