Sigh.

It’s rather unfortunate that when it comes to Evie, the no-sleep saga is a never ending story. I can’t even begin to tell you the number of times we’ve “solved” her sleep issues. It’s quite clear that it’s something that’s never going to BE solved, it just is what it is at this point.

So once again we arrive at the point where Evie is waking everybody up in the house. Our room shares a wall with theirs, so we would frequently be awakened at 5 a.m. or so to singing filtering through the (very thin-seeming) wall. Worse than that, she would wake us up a million times per night, usually to tell us that she “had to go to the bathroom” or “needed to be tucked back in”. All of this was frustrating in the extreme, but we could live with it.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was poor Ollie. It’s one thing to wake us up, but he would literally cry in the morning asking to go back to sleep. The final straw was waking up one morning to him screaming at her to stop singing so he could get some sleep. Poor guy. We just realized that it wasn’t fair to him, and something had to be done.

So Evie is back where she started, downstairs in her own room.

Of course, she’s still terrified to be down there all by herself. The first night in particular was a rough one. The thing is, I know that she has a very vivid imagination, just like I did, and often terrifies herself, just as I did. So my heart just absolutely goes out to her when she’s crying and scared of the dark, and it’s really difficult for me to resist her pleas in a situation like that. But I knew it was the best thing for all of us.

And so it was. By the morning she was already over it, and Ollie has been sleeping like a rock. We’ve been waking him up in the morning, he’s been sleeping so well. And even then he doesn’t want to get up. Evie has broken the rules a few times and come upstairs to wake us up, but far less overall than she had been.

She’s still not exactly comfortable down there. Every night after I tuck her in, she pushes things in front of the door to block it. But there are perks to being down there as well. Now that she’s not going to bed with Ollie, we’re letting her stay up a little later to read in bed. She suddenly seems so much older now that she’s reading in bed, turning the light off herself, and then getting dressed before she comes upstairs in the morning.

I am a little disappointed that they won’t be sharing a room anymore. But I will drown my disappointment in 8 glorious hours of unbroken sleep tonight, and I suppose I’ll get over it.