Operation Sandman: Night 18 Is The Hill I Choose To Die On.

Night 18:  In bed at 8:30. Falls asleep by 9:30.

Night 17: Mr F asleep at 8:15, wakes up at 1 and 3, goes back to sleep relatively quickly.
Night 16: Mr F asleep at 10,  wakes up at 11, and 1:30, up for about an hour each time.

Night 18: Mr F wakes up the first time at 11.

Night 15: Mr F asleep about 8. Wakes up twice, about 1 and 3, goes back to sleep after a whileNight 14: Mr F asleep at 10. Wakes up at 1:45 a.m., never goes back to sleep. 

Night 18: Mr F asleep at 11:30, wakes up again at midnight.

Night 13: Mr F asleep at 8:30, wakes up twice at 1 and 3, goes back to sleep after a while.Night 12: Mr F in bed at 8:30, falls asleep at 10:30, wakes up at 4:45, doesn't go back to sleep.Night 11: Asleep at 8, got up once or twice for short periods of time.

Night 18: Mr F still awake at 1:45 a.m. I take him for another ride.

Night 8: Mr F in bed just past 8, falls asleep about 9:45, up twice for about 1 hour each time, around 2 and 4.Night 7: Mr F in bed just past 8, falls asleep by 8:45, wakes up twice for about an hour each time.

Night 18: Mr F still awake at 3 a.m., tries to go downstairs to play the piano.

So this is three weeks into it, and it's not getting any better.

So it's 3:15 a.m. and I can't focus my eyes because I'm so tired.

So it's 3:15 a.m. and now Mr Bunches has been woken up by Mr F.

So:

I told Mr Bunches that if he wanted to, he could go downstairs and sleep on the couch because things were going to get loud.

Then I told Mr F that this was it, and he would have to sleep in his room the rest of the night, or stay there and play quietly.

I closed the door and put the hook on and heard Mr F start crying and knocking on the door. I opened it and told him to lay down. I covered him up. I started to leave and he stood up crying and pulled at my hand. Mr Bunches asked if I could quiet him down. I got Mr Bunches his headphones and said he could come and sleep on the couch tonight, or he could put his headphones on. Mr Bunches put his headphones on and I tucked Mr F in again and closed the door quickly as he got up and pulled on it.

I went and laid in our bed. 3:30 a.m. He was knocking and pounding on the door and crying at the top of his lungs.

At 3:40 I went downstairs and got him one of his exercise balls to bounce on, and his Kindle tablet. I took it upstairs, tucked him in, started Ice Age on his Kindle, gave him his tappers, told him I loved him, and left, locking the door.

At 4:00 I went in, because he'd been crying again and pounding on the door nonstop. I tucked him in again, restarted Ice Age, told him he could bounce on his exercise ball if he wanted, took him to the bathroom to see if he had to go, and told him that this was it: I wasn't coming back in there.

Around 4:30 he quieted down.

Around 6:00 a.m. Sweetie got up and let them go downstairs. I slept in until 8.

Operation Sandman, Night 16

Tuesday night, Mr F woke up at 1:45 am and never went back to sleep.

Last night he fell asleep at 8. Sweetie said he woke up twice, each time for about 10-15 minutes.

Tonight, he fell asleep at 10, and has woken up at 11, and now, 1:30 a.m.

Operation Sandman, Night 12: "I let the darkening room drink up the evening, till rest, or the new rain lightly roused you awake. I asked if you heard the rain in your dream and half dreaming still you only said, I love you.”

Thursday night last week, Sweetie reported that Mr F woke up twice, going back to sleep in about 30 minutes each time.

Friday night, Mr F took until 10:30 to fall asleep, then woke at 4:45 the next morning, which as Sweetie pointed out, was a pretty good night. (It's always easier to be positive about someone else's night. She hadn't had to sit there for two hours and take an extra ride with him. But she was right.)

I mentioned to her that night that it seemed like now, he was nervous on my nights. Once or twice, on Sweetie's night, he's made me be the one to sit in there, but this night he seemed like he didn't feel safe.

Saturday, Sweetie got him in bed at 8 and at 8:15 he was asleep. He got up twice last night she said, for a short time each time.

So tonight, I was hopeful. We'd had a busy day: Park and splash park in the afternoon, and then because Mr Bunches wanted to go swimming we'd walked to the pool after dinner and swam, then gone for a family ride. Then I took Mr F for his own ride in the little car, and he was dozing off on the way home.

But when we got inside, he ran into our room and tried to get Sweetie to come in his room, pushing me out. Then before we could react to that he went downstairs to put on his shoes. We tried to talk him out of another ride, but he ran into the kitchen and pointed to the picture of Sweetie's car that we put up by the mystery picture.

(I will talk about the mystery picture another day.)

So I took him for another ride. He was all discombobulated, half-crying and half-panicky, as I got him into his safety harness. When we went downstairs, while I undid the chain on the garage door he grabbed a pair of old tennis shoes and carried them over to me.

"You don't need shoes," I told him gently.

He carried them with him to the car and as I buckled him into Sweetie's car for this ride, he tried to put the shoes on, getting upset when they wouldn't go on easily and trying to get me to help him.  "It's okay," I said.  "You don't need shoes." He calmed down and let me take them away from him.

We took another short ride, this time in Sweetie's car. When we got home he took my hand and walked with me upstairs, climbing into his bed. He's in there snoring now, at 10:19 p.m.

Operation Sandman Night 8: "Yes; bless the man who first invented sleep (I really can't avoid the iteration); But blast the man with curses loud and deep, Whate'er the rascal's name, or age, or station, Who first invented, and went round advising, That artificial cut-off,—Early Rising."

I skipped last night, because when we got Mr F into his bed, I first went to get a glass of water and knocked a bunch of stuff over and then tripped over Sweetie in the hall so I gave up and went to bed at about 8:15, where I read for 5 minutes before falling asleep and not waking up at all until 6:45 this morning.

Anyway, tonight's my night. We went for the usual ride and he's been in bed about 15 minutes. He groused a little at the end of the ride because he wanted to go around again, but I said No not just because we'd just taken one but in fact we'd taken two: before his nightly ride we'd gone for a ride as a family because it was raining and Mr Bunches was scared and wanted to settle down.

I can hear him fidgeting in there, but he's not too bad.

Sweetie reported that last night he only woke up twice, at 2 and at 4, and each time he went back to sleep pretty quickly. The problem last night was Mr Bunches: it rained last night, too, and he heard the thunder and woke up at 1. He never got back to sleep, and a couple times he called for Sweetie.

We're thinking once school starts next week it might help. We don't know if the lack of a routine during the day makes it worse. They have a bit of a routine with Sweetie, but it's not as rigid as when school's in session. Routine really, really, helps them be calm. Plus school tires them out, more than we could possibly do even if we ran around all day doing stuff, which we do a lot of days anyway. School's just more strenuous all around, probably because there are so many things they have to think about.

But he seems like he's doing better.

The other night I watched an old Seinfeld where Kramer decides to sleep only 20 minutes every three hours, like Leonardo Da Vinci did.

The trouble with that is that there's no proof that Da Vinci actually engaged in what's called "polyphasic sleep," meaning "sleep for more than one period a day." Polyphasic sleep is an example of a circadian rhythm disorder, when the body is out of whack from the normal sleep cycle. It's sometimes caused by head injuries, and I wondered if Mr F might have that from his old head injury, but that was four years ago (almost four years to the day), and it doesn't seem like it would just crop up now with no other symptoms or problems.

While I was reading about that, I came across the concept of "sleep inertia," which is actually a thing! (Mr F is in there talking to himself now; I just shushed him. It's 9:10 pm as I write this.) I've felt often that even though I woke up, I didn't wake up wake up, so to speak. That's sleep inertia.

"Sleep inertia" is grogginess and clumsiness when you wake up. It happens the worst if you're awakened in the first 10-30 minutes of sleep; the few times this year that I've dozed off on a lazy afternoon or evening, and been woken up, I've felt the rest of the day like I'm still half-asleep. So at least I know my thing is actually a thing and not just me  being lazy.

Operation Sandman, Night 6: "The amount of sleep needed by the average person is five more minutes."

Sweetie reported that Mr F woke up only twice last night, between 2 and 4. He's pretty overtired today still. He's been having tics all week: he does a series of short, sharp inhaled breaths, over and over, in this strange rhtythm: hs hs hs    hs hs .

When I got him in bed tonight, I started to walk back out the door. He got mad and stormed into the hall. I showed him that I was sitting down the hall -- I'm five feet from his door, out of his sight, with the door half-closed. He went downstairs and tapped the picture for 'car ride,' but since we'd just come from that I told him no, it's bedtime. He groused quite a bit but he's in bed and laying quietly now.

... Literally just as I typed that last line, Mr Bunches whispered from inside the room.  "Hey dad," he said.

"What is it?" I whispered.

Mr F yelled something over Mr Bunches' answer. When Mr F calmed down I whispered "Say it again?"

Mr Bunches whispered: "I dreamed that when I was little I hurt my head on the snow and ice."

"It was only a dream," I told him. "Your head is okay."

Operation Sandman, Night 5: "There never was a child so lovely, but his mother was glad to get him asleep."

Just a quick one tonight.

Friday, Mr F woke up twice, once at 12::30, and once at 2. Both times Sweetie got him back to sleep and made it back to bed in about 1 hour.

Last night, he woke up at 1230, and I was able to go back to bed around 1:15. But he woke up again right away, and this time it took until 2 a.m. before I could get back to bed. Then he slept until 7:15 am.

Tonight is off to a rough start. We took a long ride, but he didn't settle down, so we took another shorter ride. Things are quiet up there right now.

Operation Sandman: Night 4: “Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, And yet a third of life is passed in sleep.”

The purple thing on his head
is a pad I use to rest my arms on
when I'm typing. The blur in front of his face
is his tappers.

I was looking at an article that talked about the evolutionary basis for sleep and came across something that struck me as silly; people think scientists can't be dumb, but they can, and this is an example:

At first glance it would seem that sleep is a bad idea. In most environments animals face the prospect of being consumed by other creatures if not constantly alert to the danger around them. Being unconscious for long periods of time would not seem to offer a selective advantage. And yet most animals seem to sleep in some form. It may be that sleep offers the benefit of conserving energy while focusing on repair of the body, in order to allow an animal to utilize maximum energy while awake for survival purposes. In addition, predator and prey animals generally develop a symbiotic relationship. This is necessary because a predator that developed the ability to hunt 24 hours a day would rapidly deplete all the prey that serve as food. Not only would the prey animal be driven to extinction but so would the predator. Sleep helps even things out.

That is silly for a number of reasons. First, I am not sure that saying "an evolutionary basis for sleep" is even a reasonable thing to say. I mean, I say it, but I'm a lawyer, not a scientist. To suggest that we evolved an ability to sleep is to suggest that at some point we didn't sleep.

Secondly, predators don't hunt every second that they are awake. A predator who didn't have to sleep wouldn't necessarily hunt any more than a predator that sleeps 8 hours a night.

Thirdly, if "sleep helps even things out" that suggests that predators developed -- evolved -- sleep as a method of not extincting themselves by hunting out an area, or prey in general. That seems like the longest possible way to get where you want to go. Say some animal -- sabre-toothed tigers, maybe -- got the ability to never sleep, and began hunting nonstop, cleaning out its hunting area. That animal wouldn't just lay there and die, it would begin to roam farther for more food. This is what deer, for example, do: when their habitat gets all humaned up, they simply range farther and farther (and more into human territory, too.) So evolution might favor an animal not sleeping. But if the goal is to not have to constantly roam into other animals' territories, then evolving to essentially drop dead for 8 hours a day seems much, much harder than evolving to, say, stop hunting when you don't need food.

And, fourthly, "sleep helps even things out" suggests that the prey was already sleeping -- because the predators are 'evened out' by sleeping. So this guy imagined a world where prey have evolved to sleep, despite the obvious disadvantage that puts an animal at in a world where predators do not yet sleep, and then predators, in an effort to deliberately limit their intake of prey, evolve a similar ability. It's an evolutionary version of that one Xmas Eve in World War I where they all played soccer.

Evolution can't explain everything. No one scientific concept can explain everything. That's why people's hunts for a 'cause' for autism -- or insomnia, for that matter -- is so difficult. When a human condition can take so many different forms, it almost certainly isn't purely genetic. Consider height: people have a wide variety of height, and build. Some tall people are very skinny; others are broad. Some people have the capacity to reach six feet, maybe seven feet -- but because of their nutrition, for example, they may only reach 5'6". I am the tallest person in my entire extended family, a good two inches taller than every relative I have.

Autism may be like height: there may be a capacity, in every person, to have the particular combination of neurological, physiological, and psychological traits that make a person autistic. Sensory sensitivity, for example, may be worse in some people than others: the boys only like to wear certain kinds of clothing and are partial to certain kinds of blankets. I myself have come across clothing, as an adult, that I can't stand to wear -- it makes my skin crawl. So we are all three of us sensitive, but I may be better at tuning it out.

We were talking today about why Mr F doesn't sleep, and how he got like this. Mr F, I have lately been saying, escalates. Both boys do, to an extent, but Mr F has a worse problem with it. Here's an example: Starting early last school year, in the third grade, when he came home, Mr F would get off the bus and on his way up the stairs to the porch would stop and pull a bit of bark off a tree.  We didn't think much of it. After a few days, he stopped and pulled bark off two trees. Then one day he also stopped and grabbed a handful of dirt from the edge of the porch and flung it.

Soon, on his way inside, he was stopping at three trees to try to pull bark off, throwing a handful of dirt, taking both our mats off our porch, and taking the sign that says "The Pagels" off the wall and tossing it into the plants. These things crept up, and by the time they became problematic, we were trying to stop him. On many days, if I was working from home, I would take a break and go help Sweetie, sometimes physically carrying Mr F past all these things. Sweetie would try taking him in through the garage, or holding his hands all the way up the walk.

He still sometimes tries to do that, even though it's August and we don't really use the front walk in the summer.

So two years ago, Mr F got upset that we were gone for a night on our anniversary, and after that he wanted someone to sit in the room with him while he fell asleep. Over the past two years, he's slowly moved from that to wanting someone in there all night long with him, even after he falls asleep.

We don't know why he escalates, any more than we know why he taps forks to calm himself down or only eats a certain kind of cheese puff.

A predator almost certainly wouldn't spend all its time hunting, even if it didn't have to sleep, ever. Animals don't hunt for sport and don't waste food. A predator that suddenly found itself unable to, or not needing to, sleep, might use some of the extra time to get more food and grow stronger.

Predators, animals in general, don't seem to live the kind of complex lives we do. Even a 9-year-old boy, living in a quiet house in a suburb in Wisconsin, has a life that is mind-bogglingly complex. Today, we went to a library one town over, a new library where Mr F had never been. He enjoyed it at first, but grew restless after we'd been there a while. We took him swimming at the indoor pool he likes, where the pool was more crowded than usual and, at one point, when he saw a pool toy he liked I had to stop him from using it because it belonged to a little girl playing nearby. His mom left for an hour to go to her exercise class this morning; his dad left for a half-hour to go walking at night. At 5:20, he wanted to play tickling, but 5:20 was dinnertime and the rule is that we don't play during dinnertime. He doesn't eat dinner with us, and doesn't like the food we eat. When he was told he couldn't play tickle he tapped the picture for "Mom's Room" to go hang out there; he likes to climb under the blankets and lay very still, giggling. He was told he had to wait 10 minutes.

Who knows what he makes of all that? Sometimes, if I have a lot on my mind, I can't get to sleep. I lie awake and think about cases, or worry about money or the car or my sons. Sometimes I can't get my mind to shut off. Once, in law school, I spent an entire night sitting up watching movies because I couldn't even get sleepy. We think kids' worlds can't be complicated or confusing, but even if you're not autistic, there's a lot of stuff in the world to figure out.

But it's 9:13 p.m. and he's been in bed now for nearly twenty minutes. I've been sitting in the hall the whole time. When he came up to bed, he looked a little sad as I tucked him in and said I would be out in the hall. I left his door open, but he can't see me from his bed. He hasn't made a sound at all.

Operation Sandman, Night 3: "O Sleep O gentle Sleep, Nature's soft nurse, how have I frightened thee, that thou will no more weigh my eyelids down and steep my senses in forgetfulness?"

It's 8:48 p.m. It's Sweetie's night, and she is upstairs in the hall, with the boys' door open. Mr F doesn't like it. I can hear him up there, moaning quietly and trying, from time to time, to get Sweetie to come sit in the room.

I haven't gone upstairs yet. I was going to go up and go to bed, but until he settles down, I don't want to walk by his room or have him know that I'm in our room at the end of the hall.

This is why, even though we alternate nights sitting with him, it's not really a break: last night, he got up and went into our room once, while I tried to stop him. Plus you can hear him, and it's hard to sleep when you know at least two people are up and having a terrible time of it.

He's almost crying up there, like just short of actual tears.  Sweetie keeps telling him quietly to go to sleep.

Tonight I'd actually planned, right after dinner, to go up to bed early, at like 6:30. But Mr F wanted to go swimming, and he wanted me to go with him, so I took him and Mr Bunches while Sweetie cleaned up. Then when we got home he wanted a ride in the little car, so I took him on that, too. He and I have both been up for 18 hours now. As I listen to him, I know how he feels.

We don't know why he can't sleep, and he can't tell us. All we can do is keep trying.  If you try to read up on whether there's some sort of connection between autism and insomnia, the facts are all over the place and hardly worthy of the name 'facts.' People give wildly varying statistics about how many kids with autism have sleep problems (one study that is widely cited said "44 to 83%" of people with autism have sleep disorders. That is: 4 or maybe 8 out of every 10. That's not science. That's a guess.) Many studies don't compare those numbers to the general public, and nobody really knows whether this autistic person is really like that autistic person so even when someone can tell you why he or she can't sleep, it doesn't mean that it applies to every person with autism -- any more than everyone gets insomnia for the same reason.

When you have sleep disorders, they do a sleep study. I had to have one done for a life insurance exam a while back. An at-home study has you wire yourself up with various things that measure heart rate and breathing and the like, sleeping with a little electronic pack on you. It's doubtful at best that we could get Mr F to wear one. Clinical sleep studies require that you go sleep in a strange room while people watch. When we went to a hotel last week (Mr Bunches picked that as his big summer thing: we went to a hotel a few miles away), Mr F couldn't sleep and paced the room back and forth, getting so anxious that Sweetie took him back home to sleep while I stayed with Mr Bunches, who was already asleep himself.

When Mr F goes to the dentist, if he needs anything more than a quick peek inside he has to be given general anesthesia at the hospital. The last time he had that, they gave him the stuff they give you to relax you so that you're almost asleep by the time they wheel you in. He fought it so well that it took me and three orderlies to hold him down while they put the gas mask on him.

So we don't think he'd do well at a sleep study, and if he has sleep apnea or something similar we may never know. (He doesn't snore.)  Some doctors will do the tests in the kid's home, spending up to two months prior making frequent visits to get the child used to the equipment and the doctor.

In one recent study, participating kids with autism took 160 minutes to fall asleep and enter REM (or dreaming) sleep. Kids without autism took 100 minutes. While sleeping, kids with autism spend about 10% less time in REM sleep than control groups. Nobody is sure why that is. And some of the results suggest that rather than sleep patterns being caused by autism, they may be a factor contributing to the condition. (One girl with autism had tonsils and adenoids removed to help her sleep apnea; she became more socially responsive and exhibited less problematic behavior after her sleep improved.)

It's 9:14 p.m. now. Things are quiet upstairs.  Goodnight, Mr F.

Operation Sandman, Night 2 Update: Well #@$&%!!*&

3:16 a.m.:

Mr F woke up at 230. I checked with him, helped him lay back down and sat in the chair in the hall reading.

At 250, he was almost asleep but wanted to move to the floor.

At 310 he was asleep and I started to stand up and head to bed but the CHAIR CREAKED LIKE AN OLD HOUSE IN A HURRICANE AND WOKE HIM UP.

*sighs, heads back to Buzzfeed*

UPDATE 330 AM I have moved to the floor & am planning class action suit against chairs.

UPDATE 406 AM: No sound or movement from bed for 36 minutes. Left leg completely numb. I got up to close the door. There was a tiny creak. He's back up. I'm back down.

UPDATE 510 AM: I broke down and we took a ride to calm him down. It didn't. He's laying in his bed, occasionally mumbling to himself or hitting his head. When we got back from the ride, Mr Bunches briefly woke up.

"Dad," he said. "Are you back?"

I said I was.

"I'm sure glad you're back," he said.

"Me, too," I agreed.

After about 20 seconds, he said quietly:

"Dad, when I get up in the morning can I play with my Legos?"

I said he could.

UPDATE 530 AM. I am making coffee.  Mr F is upstairs in his room, upset and trying to calm down. Mr Bunches has woken back up and is watching videos on a tablet from his bed.  Going to be a long day.

Operation Sandman, Night 2: "Sleep lays lightly on the hopeful, as well as on the anxious."

It's 9:08 p.m., and Mr F just got to bed. We were running a bit late tonight because I had to help Mr Bunches put together his new Lego set, and even though it was a small one -- 315 pieces or so -- I didn't finish until 8:30.

Then on the nightly ride we saw lightning, and outside the house right now I can hear thunder in the distance, plus rain pelting the roof. Hopefully it won't wake Mr Bunches.

Mr F is in his bed. I'm in the chair in the hall, door fully open, but not in the room.  That's what Sweetie did last night, and he was okay with it.

He only woke up 3 times last night, about every 2-3 hours, but each time Sweetie said she put him back in his bed and then sat in the chair in the hall, and he fell back asleep fairly promptly. This constitutes progress.

I can hear him in there, tapping his forks and lightly talking to himself. I shouldn't let him take his forks with him to bed, but he's out of sorts tonight. Before the ride, he was having tics, like rolling his eyes or puffing in his breath. He only does that when he's very nervous. So I'm letting him have his forks for a bit.

Operation Sandman: Night 1: "What hatn night to do with sleep?"

It's 8:01 p.m. as I write this. This is Day 1 of the plan. Tonight, rather than sit in the room with Mr F as he falls asleep, Sweetie (whose night it is) was going to sit on a chair in the doorway: inside the room but with the door open.

Things got off to a rocky start: at about 7:30 Mr F couldn't stay up any longer and wanted to go lay in his bed. Although we're supposed to keep bedtime more or less the same, and that generally starts about 7:45 with his ride and then in the room by 8:15-8:30, Sweetie figured this would be okay.

But Mr Bunches and I were drawing an alphabent -- he writes the letters and words, I draw the pictures -- and we were only on 'T.' This was a problem because Mr Bunches really likes to be first, and gets really upset if he's not first. We've been working on helping him handle it and not get so upset but so far it's tough.

So Mr Bunches got concerned that Mr F was going to be first in the bedroom (and Mr Bunches worries that Mr F will turn off the TV in their room, which serves as a sort of nightlight and which scares Mr Bunches if it's turned off.)  So we offered him the choice: he could quit the alphabet and finish it tomorrow, going up to bed now to be first, or he could let Mr F be first and we'd finish the alphabet and then take him for a little ride.

He chose option B, and Mr F went up to bed. We finished the alphabet and left on the ride, the sound of which woke Mr F up a bit. But by the time we got home 23 minutes later, Mr F was back asleep.

The problem was, Mr Bunches, who is 9 after all, reneged on the deal: he got upset again and wanted us to make Mr F come downstairs and then wait so he could be first. (I am going to confess: on other occasions we've done exactly that, but never when Mr F was already asleep.) He was getting loud and upset so I took him back downstairs to my office area, and talked to him.

I offered him a deal: let Mr F be first, and I'd take him to the bookstore tomorrow to buy a book. No.

I upped the ante: let Mr F be first and tomorrow he could to go Target and get a new small toy.  Deal.

We practiced saying his calming phrase: Sometimes [bad thing] but that's okay because [good thing.] As in Sometimes Mr F is first, but that's okay because I will get to get a toy.

He started crying and couldn't get through Sometimes Mr F.  Sat back down, talked more, talked about which toys he liked and how I know he likes being first but he also likes toys and being nice, made the deal again, said the saying, and then for good measure decided that we would help him upstairs and keep his eyes mostly covered so that he wouldn't see Mr F and it would be like he was first after all.

It all went smoothly until the bedroom door where he said, in what he seemed to think was a quiet voice But mom I'm supposed to be first.  Sweetie said shhhhh but it was done.

So: 8:09 now. Mr Bunches is in bed, writing a note to us that he is supposed to be first. That's his way of expressing his frustration: he writes us a note. Mr F is in bed, too, but he's humming and rocking back and forth. Sweetie's in her chair, in the doorway.

Operation: Sandman: Day 1. "Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies Which busy care draws in the brains of men; Therefore thou sleep’st so sound"

Mr F does not sleep.

Mr F has not slept for a long time. I mean almost literally has not slept.

Almost every night, when Mr F goes to bed, we take him for a ride on his 'route.' This is a 4-5 mile drive around Middleton, the same ride every night, to help him calm down. Once home, we take him up to the room he shares with Mr Bunches. Then, as we have had to do every single night since May, 2014, one of us sits in the room until he falls asleep.

That's something that started over 2 years ago when Sweetie and I went and stayed at a hotel as part of our anniversary. Even though his babysitters are his older brother and sisters, Mr F got nervous and after that could not fall asleep unless one of us was sitting in the room with him.

Over the past two years we tried various things to get him out of this habit, but it has never gone away, not a single night. Many nights, it's gotten worse. There have been many many nights in the past six months especially where he hasn't gone to sleep until midnight or later, or where he wakes up at 3.

It used to not be as big a problem though, because at least some nights he would just sit quietly in his room. We could hear him in there, mumbling and tapping his forks, but he didn't wake up Mr Bunches and it didn't cause much trouble other than he was tired the next day. He'd do that four or five days in a row, sometimes, and then, exhausted, sleep soundly the next 2 or 3.

But something changed late in the last school year. Mr F began not sitting quietly any longer, knocking on the door instead. We have to lock Mr F and Mr Bunches in their room at night, with a hook and eye, because if we didn't they would almost certainly come to harm. (In June of this year, a 5-year-old autistic boy piled up two beanbag chairs to stand on, unlocked his front door and left his house in the middle of the night. He had been sleeping in his bed when his mom checked on him, at 2 a.m. He was later found dead.)

If Mr F knocks, on the door, we go see what he wants. He may be thirsty, he may have to use the bathroom or need something else. But this summer he started knocking on the door and then when we opened it -- Sweetie and I trade nights being responsible for Mr F duty -- he would pull us inside and climb back on his bed, and we'd have to sit there again until he fell asleep. Sometimes he never would. On at least 6 occasions this summer, I have sat the whole night in there with Mr F, sometimes laying on the floor and dozing, or trying to read. Sweetie had as many times, if not more.  We took to taking some cushions off an old couch and putting them in there in case that happened.

Even if he does go back to sleep, this might happen 3 or 4 times in a night. Which means that on a good night you might only get woken up once and would get 6 hours of sleep in 3 hour increments. On a bad night, you didn't sleep.

It's left us with times on the weekend or a weeknight where one of us will take the boys out of the house for a few hours so the other one can nap; I did that for Sweetie last night, taking them to swim right after dinner and not coming back until almost 7:30.

Last night wasn't solely Mr F; Mr Bunches was the cause this time: there was lightning and Mr Bunches saw it, around 2 a.m. He got scared because thunderstorms scare him to death. So, it being my turn, I went in there and got Mr Bunches, who wanted to take a ride in the car to calm down. Sweetie slept on while Mr F and Mr Bunches and I took a ride on the regular route, at 2:00 a.m.

When we got back, I sat down in the room to wait for the boys to go back to sleep. Mr F never did. After 45 minutes I figured he was never going to fall asleep -- it was 3:15 a.m. -- so I stretched out on the cushions and tried to get a catnap.

Mr F, though, would talk to himself, or get upset (maybe because he couldn't sleep) or tap his forks, or sometimes just wake me up or try to get out of the room. So from 2 on, I slept hardly at all and when I did it was for only about 10 minutes at a time.

You can imagine what kind of state I'm in today.

Sweetie and I have come up with a plan, though. It'll take about 10 days, to see if it works.  The plan starts tonight. I am going to call it Operation: Sandman.

I'll try to post daily (or nightly) as the case may be, and let you know how it's working.