Stella decided to stay up all night on Friday. Ok, maybe not all night, only until 5am. And truthfully, 5am is the middle of the night in my book. If I go to sleep around midnight, get up at 9am, that makes 4:30am the middle of the night.
Even so, I expect the children to get in their beds at around 10pm, asleep before 11pm. On this night, she did not follow the protocol. Brian said she was simply not tired. She talked. She read. She played on her computer. She even spent a good hour pulling dog hair out of the wheels of their office chairs. If that's not boring enough to put you to sleep, I don't know what is!
There was no reason for this awakeness. She had not taken her ADHD meds late. She hadn't had a bunch of caffeine or sugar (which don't seem to cause this anyway.) She was excited about having seen the musical, Into the Woods, but that shouldn't have taken 7 hours to wear off.
She did need to take her night medicine. She has a drug that calms her down in the evening. I was asleep and she told her dad that she was told by her psychiatrist that she, "shouldn't take it after 10 or 11pm because everyone is asleep then anyway."
Um...what?
You see, this is how Stella's brain works. She heard her psych say something about medicine. And something about time. She swirled these around in her brain for a couple of months and came up with this story, which she totally, 100% believes is true. She could probably recite exact statements from the doctor.
Still, she's dead wrong.
What the psych had said was that she shouldn't take her ADHD meds after noon because they could keep her up at night since they are stimulants.
Yep, same thing.
In any case, it sounded somewhat legit to a sleepy father and he went with it, not wanting to wake me up to ask my opinion. [Note: this was very nice of him!] He didn't think about her melatonin. Or benedryl (which the psych said we can give her when these sleepless nights arise.)
When the little imp woke me up at 4:30am, I gave her 2 melatonins and a benedryl. She was asleep by 5am. Of course, I couldn't fall back to sleep. And I had to get up at 6am in order to judge at the Lego Robotics Tournament. Of course. You know what they call that? The luck of the Irish.
This is your friendly reminder to vote. All you do is click, which takes you to the website where you then do nothing. Or you can do something, but you don't have to do something. It's easy. Thanks :)
0 comments: