Allrightythen

So do you all remember several months back when I was posting almost every day about our woes with Stephen? He suddenly went a little crazy and was having tantrums at all hours of the night and having awful behavior during the day. I was sleeping in his room for weeks and I finally gave up and told him that if he needed to be in the same room as me, then he would have to be the one sleeping in my room on the floor. Since then, he's been coming in in the middle of the night to sleep the rest of the night on a palette on our bedroom floor. I wasn't happy about it, but as long as I got to sleep all night in my own bed, I was willing to go along with it. I eventually got him a clock for his room and told him he couldn't come in until 1am. It worked great and that's been our arrangement for several months.

One night last week, though, he went to bed really late after a long and hard day. He ended up staying in his own bed until about 6:30am. When he got up to come into our room, I was awake enough to tell him that if he stayed in bed 1 more hour he would have stayed in bed all night long (6:30am is still middle of the night to us). He said, "Okay!" and happily went back to his room and slept for another hour and a half. He was so proud when he woke up and called everyone. He told me that afternoon that he was going to stay in his room all night that night, too, and I was all "Yeah, sure." But he did, and he has every night since. He even invited his brothers to go into my room and tear up his palette with him (he was very particular about his palette being right and straight).

So that problem worked out all on its own without any coaxing or worrying on my part. And I think his mood's better during the day, too. Which makes life easier on EVERYONE, because if Stephen ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.

And on a sidenote, I went back through my archives to find the link for the post I linked above and it's really interesting because I don't remember most of the huge issues that I posted about. I remember that we had a hard time overall, but not specific situations. Things were so bad back then that I would pray every day for God to help us all forget some of the really awful situations (mostly because of how I hated how I handled some of them). And I have forgotten. I don't think Stephen remembers either. He's got an amazing memory and brings up good and bad memories from long ago and he's never mentioned anything from that time. God is good.