Tall oaks from little acorns grow...

Why on earth do smoke alarms only go off at terribly unspeakable hours of the morning?  We have had ours' malfunction about six times since we moved into this house, and every single time has been at night, in the hours when sleep is the deepest and the chance of waking up with a massive fright (if not downright heart attack) is the greatest.  And the most ironic thing is that ADT, who of course phone immediately that the alarm goes off (thereby adding to the general chaos and pandemonium reigning in the household at that time), choose to ask as their first question "Was anybody standing underneath the smoke detector and spraying on perfume or deodorant at the time when it went off?"  As if!  At three in the morning, I think it highly unlikely for anyone to be standing in the upright position, let alone considering spritzing themselves with perfume or deodorant.  

But what I hate the most is the effect of the smoke alarm on three sleeping kids.  Last night, I had just managed to get Little Miss Snoopy to be persuaded into sleep for about the fourth time (Okay - I admit it!  I am a psychologist and I have a child that doesn't sleep through the night.  At all!  Ever!  And has never done!). 

Just as we were settling into sleep ourselves, and I was glancing blearily at a clock that said 3:16am, the awful racket which signifies a smoke detector malfunction started.  Pandemonium broke loose as usual, yet I was surprised when the boys did not run shrieking into my bed as they would usually have done.  Instead, I heard a matter-of-fact little voice from the depths of Paddy's bed, under the duvet cover:  "I really don't like that alarm, Mama."  And that was it.

Hmmm.  I remember the days of running through to their rooms as the alarm wailed, holding their sobbing, shaking little bodies close against me while the Sweetpea attacked the detector with a screwdriver (of course there is no easy off-switch for a malfunctioning detector - it will scream until kingdom come if you let it - never be tempted by ADT to "just press *# and it will turn itself off" - you will save yourself minutes of hassle and fruitless pressing of *#).  In those long-ago days, which I can remember so vividly, the alarm was the most terrifying thing that could happen to the boys, and for hours and days afterwards, they would be afraid even to walk near the things.  They also developed a code word which they both used, almost as a protection against evil (like the Victorians made signs against the "evil eye").  "Attooofah!" they would both yell, while pointing at the alarm.  I could never discover what it meant - it was just one of those twin things that I had to assume would be beyond the understanding of a single mortal like myself.  But it seemed to give them some form of comfort in, what was to them, a terrible and unpredictable setting.

And now, they are so grown up that they hardly mention it, and see fit to go back to sleep almost immediately.  I think it was that fact more than anything else that has happened over the past month that has brought home to me the imminence of their maturity; the fact that they stand tiptoe, poised on the edge of that daunting, scary, vibrant and wonderful world of manhood.  Within seconds, they will be ready to fling themselves over the edge into the unknown, and I will have lost them.  What is that saying?  If you love something, set it free?  The person who first coined that phrase could not have been a mother - every instinct in you wants to clutch and grab and hold onto your babies for all you are worth.  

Yet the rationalist in me realises the validity of the statement.  

So, in the words of another famous author (William Shakespeare):

"Then sigh not so, but let them go,

And be you blithe and bonny, 

converting all your sounds of woe, 

into Hey, nonny, nonny!"

I am not sure what a nonny is, but even without that understanding, something in me replies: "Easier said than done, methinks!"

There were five in the bed...

When the Sweetpea first started doing some locums to make a few extra pennies, he had to travel far and wide to the hospitals that needed him most.  I was left alone for a lot of the time with the boys and Little Miss Snoopy, and I very quickly discovered that traipsing between three different rooms several times in a night to answer various cries or calls for water/a wee/a conversation in order to stay out of bed longer was exhausting and left me getting about two hours sleep in a night.  It was also around the time of the earthquakes, and I spent hours fretting in the middle of the night (when I wasn't wandering from room to room, I had to fill the empty hours somehow) about what I would do if something similar happened here and I wouldn't be able to get to all three at the same time.

I soon came up with the perfect solution - I moved everyone into my room.  That way I could be with them in an instant and return to my bed almost without really waking up, and I could also keep an eye on all of them at the same time.  I started to sleep better, and life was again rosy.

The Sweetpea was not as charmed by the idea, though.  Surprising, that! He just could not see the advantage of having five people in one room when we have a house with four bedrooms.  He started muttering about how we could have got away with living in a kaya (small shack) instead of a large and spacious house.  "It will only be while you are away," I reassured him.

He was away for quite a few weekends in a row, and then he went on kung fu camps, and we went on holiday, and then he was off to South Africa.  Suffice it to say that the kids have now been in our room for six months now with no end in sight.  And do you know what?  I absolutely love it!  I love waking in the middle of the night to their peaceful breathing, their small, snuffling night noises, their unfamiliar pattern of nocturnal activities.  But for having them in our room, I would never have known, for example, that Paddy is a sleep laugh-er.  Occasionally we are woken by fits of giggles coming from the mound of duvets under which he burrows nightly.  Sam is a sleep talker - he often talks of strange doings and addresses people in his sleep.  Little Miss Snoopy likes to know there is someone there and if she wakes in the night she kisses my face with hundreds of resounding smooches before falling asleep again with her arm flung around my neck.   

And it is no great hardship either.  The Sweetpea and I have set up our own little space in the room that used to belong to the boys, and it is almost like a little sanctum.  It's a space where we can go to be together, and we don't talk about nonsense, or fight (well, rarely), but rather a place to spend time affirming and being with each other.  And then we head back to our family, and the night is filled with children, just as the day is.  As it must be in all of those cultures who don't believe in separating their kiddies from them.  

What an unexpected blessing! And my kiddies all sleep much better than they did before, too.

In the mornings, especially those on which we can lie in, the little ones creep quietly into our bed, one by one, until the whole of our super king-size is overflowing with squirmy, wriggly-joyous little bodies, thrilled to be facing another day.  They burrow under the covers and make tents, worming their way down to the bottom of the bed and tickling feet on the way.  They kick and bounce and squeal, they act like kitties or baby mice, they cuddle into us and put their heads on our shoulders and curve their warm little bodies into ours.  And for once, we don't have superheroes; I don't get told off for calling them my "little boys".  They are my babies again, and they love it too.

A man who says he sleeps like a baby obviously does not have one!

It is normally just around the time that you finally feel you are getting the hang of the whole parenting thing that things go spectacularly wrong.  Our boys were about six months old at the time, eating and sleeping well and the Sweetpea and I were starting to feel human again.  I had even managed to put on make-up once or twice, and had been out of sweatpants at least once, a giant leap forward.  I had been out of the house to the twin club and to the shops, no minor feat for someone totally unused to being accessorised by two small babies.  Life was good.


In order to celebrate the return of our lives to relatively sane levels of functioning, the Sweetpea decided to take some leave so that we could spend some time together as a family.  Obviously unused to having their dad around full time, the twins decided to make the most of the situation.  They collectively decided (I cannot imagine that anything so well thought-out could be purely random) that they would not sleep again until he returned to work.  From that moment on, they took it in turns to sleep for only forty minutes at a time, day and night.  Better still, they timed it so that after twenty minutes of one being asleep, the other would wake up, and after nineteen minutes and fifty seconds of frantic rocking, would fall into a sound sleep, just in time for the other to wake up.  This continued the whole night and throughout the day, for the whole of the month of August.  The Sweetpea and I did not know what had hit us.  We still refer to it as the suicide month.  Sleep became like a unicorn - although rumoured to exist, it was just something we were never going to see!  When we tried to work it out at a later stage (when our brains started functioning again), we figured that we each had been sleeping less than forty minutes in a 24 hour period.


It was time for drastic action.  We were firmly convinced that as parents, we wanted to raise our children according to the principles of Attachment theory, which maintains that little ones should be nurtured and never left to cry or feel rejected.  It was as though the boys wanted to see how committed we were to the principles.   We decided that they only way for us to survive was to split them up, and so for the first time in their short lives, they were assigned to different rooms, and were more than four meters away from each other.  The Sweetpea and I would assign ourselves a different child each night and spend that time rocking and comforting and doing whatever it took to get them back to sleep again.  We slept on the floors beside their cots for most of the time, and on the few occasions when we both ended up in our own bed at the same time, it felt as though there was a stranger climbing into bed with us.  We would look at each other in a bemused way, grunt, and then fall straight back to sleep again.


We were never sure what happened to change it, or perhaps the diabolical attachment test was over, but as quickly as it had started, it finished.  The Sweetpea headed back to work, vowing never to take leave again, and the twins started sleeping like angels.  


Just goes to show - you can do anything you like, but until your kids decide to change their behaviour, you are wasting your time.  So who is really running our families?  I think our children are kind enough to let us believe it is us parents in control, but the reality is far from that!