Bedtime Battles

It's 9:52 PM. My alarm is going to go off in exactly 6 hours. My day starts at 4am so that I can do some chores in the house before I leave for work. I work 7 am - 3 pm so that I can be home when my boys get off the school bus. At this time, I refuse to put my boys in the after school program because we had a bad experience a couple of years ago with a teacher who just doesn't understand the inflexible thinking of my son who has Aspergers.

Just before Jared went to bed he told me that he doesn't know how to go to sleep. He said he just can't relax to be able to fall asleep. The product of ADHD I guess. I responded to him that he knew how to go to sleep when he was a baby, however, I had to swaddle him tightly in his blanket for him to fall asleep. I swaddled him until he was almost a year old. I thought I was so good at swaddling; little did I know that I had a child with an Autistic Spectrum Disorder and who had a nervous system that preferred deeper sensations. Things seemed so simple back then.

It's 10:02 and the house is quiet. I think the consequence of not being able to play on the computer before school did the trick. It's funny; when the kids were small, I did not try to tiptoe around the house when the kids went down for bed, and now it seems that's what I have to do so that there aren't as many distractions in the house for Jared to be able to let his mind go in order to relax and eventually fall asleep.