Sleep

Brice is not a good sleeper. It has not always been like this. He started sleeping through the night at 3 weeks. By 3 months, he was up to 11 hours. As he's gotten older, his sleep has gotten progressively worse. As has his behavior--no big surprise there.

First he was getting up closer to 7, then 6am. Now, we force him to stay in his bed until 6am, because (apparently) he gets up long before then. We have found him watching TV in the basement at 3am. Sometimes he'll get up in the morning and tell us he got up at 3, then 4, then 5. And we believe him. He always has dark circles under his eyes. ALWAYS. And he's just so tired all the time. He yawns, he's irritable, he melts down with the slightest provocation. Some of this is his personality. He's intense and emotional. But we just knew that sleep must play a big part in this.

We've tried everything we could think of--melatonin, Benadryl, warm milk. Putting him to bed early, later, blackout curtains. You name it. We had him tested for allergies. Cut out gluten and dairy. Nothing worked. I was googling "black circles under eyes" and saw a common thread--adenoids. So I made an appt. with his pediatrician. Tonsils and adenoids were fine. DANG!!!  But on a hunch, I made an appt. with a pediatric ENT. We went today. She stuck a long scope up his nose and lo and behold...his adenoids are HUGE. As are his tonsils. How did the pediatrician miss this? I don't know.

But apparently he has 90% blockage in his adenoids. So, when he turns 5 in three weeks (knock me over with a feather--FIVE--how did this happen??) we will do a sleep study where they hook up his head and monitor his sleep to see what's really going on. But this is good news. GREAT NEWS. There is a reason! He might start sleeping well and long. No more black circles! We told him this at our celebratory Starbucks stop and do you know what he said?

"Will this help me be good?"

Oh, Brice. Sweet Brice. It's a start, at least :)