Meanwhile, I Die

Most nights I don't just go to sleep. I die.

There are so many things that can go wrong at bedtime and being tired myself I don't always handle them as well as I should. Although I am getting better.

The hallway from the front door to the living room runs parallel to our master bathroom. So it is sometimes difficult for Gregory to know where he needs to go to brush his teeth. This evening he was hanging out in the hallway and I asked, "What are you doing?"

As usual he couldn't really explain so I followed up with, "There isn't anything out there that you need to worry about now."

He disagreed.

I suggested, "Do you want to brush your teeth?" as he reentered the bedroom.

"Yes. That is what I was going to do."

So I pointed to the bathroom and said, "That is where you brush your teeth."

He proceeded to go into the bathroom and brush his teeth.

Meanwhile, I died.

This is a new behavior that I have just identified at bedtime, although at other times, when I tell him to go into the bathroom, or the guest bathroom, or the TV room, or the bedroom; he is not sure where I want him to go.

Brushing his teeth is also confusing. He can find the toothbrush and toothpaste (although never puts them back where they came from, I do that for him.)

Figuring out how to take off the cap on the toothpaste, squeeze a nurdle of paste onto the brush, wet the brush, and then brush and rinse works most of the time.

But every third, or seventh, or nineteenth time he get frozen at one or another of the steps so I have to unravel the mystery for him. The hard part for me is the coming and going of his intermittant ability and that clouds how I react.

Sometimes I can "swallow" my reaction, other times I comment on the absurdity of his behavior if only because after the fourteenth or fifteenth time I forget that he gets confused while brushing his teeth. I treat him like his "normal" was my "normal" and then apologize.

What I cannot do for sure is explain to him where he went wrong or why, for example, explaining to him that filling the cap with paste after taking it off the tube of tooth paste is not part of the process.

Meanwhile, I die.

Taking his daytime clothes off and putting them on the bench for me to put them in the closet doesn't always work. He stops short of his underpants and undershirt and if I say something like, "Take off the rest." That makes no sense to him. If I point, it doesn't always help. If I yank on the articles of clothing in question, that doesn't always work either.

Sometimes before I can get to him, he puts his sleep bottoms over his underwear, or puts tops or bottoms on backwards, or inside out. Sometimes he will recognize the problem but not know how to fix it. When he doesn't realize the problem, maybe I should just keep my mouth shut and accept his "normal" and not care how many layers he is wearing or in what direction they are facing. I am working at getting better at this but instead I try to help.

Meanwhile, I die.

In the next BLOG I will talk about reading at bedtime. This hasn't been working well for a while, I have tried many different approaches, sometimes they work, other times they do not. What I do know is that with all I have to do to get the house and Gregory put to bed, I no longer have time to read. I miss it ... and I die.