Night duty seems to be back.
June 29, 2012
By Jeff Stimpson
About 3 a.m. on many nights I hear my son Alex chortling and talking in his bedroom or in the living room, sometimes even singing. In my bed, I lift my heavy head and crane over Jill to see if there’s a bar of bright yellow shining under our bedroom door. Many nights, there is.
Alex got up in the night a lot when he was younger, and for a sleepless while Jill and I split what we termed “Night Duty.” Who would get up in the middle of the night for Alex and who would get up early in the morning for Alex? We switched. (You do it! … I did it last night! You just always forget – you are so SELFISH!)
Night duty seems to be back. Several times Alex (13 years old and PDD-NOS) has woken Ned up by rocking in bed, making the whole Ikea structure creak and weakening the joints held together with little more than a twist of the Allen Wrench. The rocking – back and forth, back and forth, creak creak creak!
For a long stretch of the Night Duty phase, I admit that we left Alex on his own in the living room in the middle of the night. Then last summer he started leaving the apartment, and now I can’t think of sleeping when that ribbon shines under our bedroom door.
I wake up around 3 and find Alex on the couch, munching pretzels. Pretzel breath at 3 a.m...
“Alex, go back to bed!” He does, darting into the shadows.
"Head down, Alex!" I see it go down in the dark. I head to the bathroom and then weave back to back past the shadows of the dining room table and chairs toward the bedroom. He always pulls this around 4:30. By the time I wrestle him to bed and convince him to stop rocking, and by the time I can wiggle my toes down there in my own sheets and drown my own thoughts with exhaustion, it’s 0600 and time for the alarm.
Then one morning at 4:30 a.m., for some reason, it hit me. “Alex, do you want to get up now?”
He laughed and laughed and laughed. I tugged him to the bathroom. His laughter evaporated when I clicked on the light. “Alex, we’re getting up now. You want to be up, we’re up!”
“Back to bed!” said Alex.
“No, Alex, you’re up now...”
“Back to bed!”
“Fine,” I told him. “Fine. Go back to bed or we’re getting up!”
Down went his head. I returned to bed. I listened and listened as 0600 neared. I didn’t get back to sleep.
Jeff Stimpson lives in New York with his wife Jill and two sons. He is the author of Alex: The Fathering of a Preemie and Alex the Boy: Episodes From a Family’s Life With Autism (both available on Amazon). He maintains a blog about his family at jeffslife.tripod.com/alextheboy, and is a frequent contributor to various sites and publications on special-needs parenting, such as Autism-Asperger’s Digest, Autism Spectrum News, The Autism Society news blog, and An Anthology of Disability Literature (available on Amazon). He is on LinkedIn under “Jeff Stimpson” and Twitter under “Jeffslife.”
Topics:Living with Autism
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Submitted by: Anonymous Date: July 25, 2012
i have that simmilar prob. my daugther doctor put her tra 50magzodone i give to her about 6pm after dinner and bath she asleep by 11 and up by 7pm. then she takes intuniv 3mg during the day. i will tell you what this is first time in 9 years my daugther ever sleep. i have been wokin up ll hours night wether she had go bath room or was hungry to her neing lonly. then strogle getting up for school. now she just pops up and gets ready her mood are so much better.
Ive got a similar issue...my 9 yr old gets up at 3ish and wont go back to sleep till 630 or so.. and then up at 7-8am it really makes for a long day...we have had to lock her room door to keep her from exiting her room and heading outside, but most of the time she is up stemming off of whatever snack weve given her, or pencils, marbles or such. I have had to unscrew the lightbulbs to keep the light off.. and she eventually gets back to sleep.. I probobaly will start her back on melatonin to maybe help her through those sleepless nites for us both!