Pick Your Battles

It is now December.

I’ll let that sink in.

Why has he been sleeping on the floor, you ask? I wish I could tell you, with a straight face, that there is some kind of medical or psychological reason. Perhaps there is one, and we haven’t figured it out yet. I can’t be too sure.

You see, it started with potty training.

(Does everything start with potty training?)

Somewhere in the haze of nursing a 3-month-old baby a dozen times a day and wiping pee off the bathroom floor in between feedings, my then 2-½-year-old started boycotting his bed. Weird, right?

But people tell you that all kinds of things can happen when you potty train:

–Your kid might get constipated.
–Your kid might turn into a monster.
–Your kid might regress emotionally and intellectually.
–Your kid might stop sleeping.
–Your kid might be more hungry/less hungry/the same amount of hungry.

I don’t know. It seemed normal that he started sleeping on the floor because it was the opposite of normal, which is what people told me to expect during potty training. I tried to cut the kid some slack—all of a sudden he had a new baby brother and was being forced to pee in a toilet. Life is hard.

So, we let him sleep on the floor. My husband and I assumed that it was a phase, as most weird things are, and that he’d grow out of it after a few weeks. But then a few weeks turned into a few months and a few months turned into 11½ months, and well, here we are, almost one full year later.

I wasn’t always so ambivalent about this problem. We tried a whole bunch of things to entice him into his bed. We bribed him with rewards, we moved his bed right next to the door, we let him sleep with his twinkle lights on. We tried taking away a privilege and told him that if he didn’t sleep in his bed, he couldn’t watch any TV the following day. He went two whole weeks without watching a single minute of television (which, let’s face it, was more of a punishment for me). Nothing worked.

No matter what we said or what we tried, it made no difference. Every night we tucked him into bed, and every night he climbed out of that bed to sleep on the floor instead. Always curled up next to the door, always on top of his favorite blue blanket that he had laid out meticulously like the world’s flattest, nonexistent mattress.