DOWN WITH THE BED!

Here I sit at 4:30am. I don't normally have insomnia, my version is child induced. Not only did Sweet Pea only sleep for 20min. at a time when she was a baby, and the 1st time after she was born that I was able to sleep thru the nite was when she was 3 yrs. old, and she sleep walks, and is scared of the dark, and is worried that we are partying it up after she goes to bed so that she is missing the best things while she sleeps (which I know is what every child thinks happens when they go to bed, I think they believe that their parents can't really be this boring all of the time!), but for the last 1 1/2 yrs. she's also been afraid of her stupid bed!
The Christmas before last we gave her a loft bed, one of the twin beds that you climb a ladder to that has a desk underneath. Big J is constantly thinking about college...how to get it paid for before she's 16, where she'll go, what she'll study, etc. He was so excited about this bed, how she can even take it to college with her (she was 8 or 9 when she got it for Christmas by the way). Well come to find out she's scared of the damned thing! You think that she would feel safer up and away from any "danger" but no. Tonight was no different than many nights here at the Leave it to Beaver household. Sometime around 4am it seems as if Sweet Pea had gotten down and gone in to Corn Niblet's bed with her. This of course woke Corn Niblet up and Corn Niblet came in to wake me up. I let her in my bed and then tried to be patient as she tossed and turned and twitched for the next 15 min. After hearing Sweet Pea standing around our room, and telling her to get in bed, I couldn't take it anymore and went downstairs to sleep on the couch. But as I layed there with visions of ripping the bed apart with my bare hands in the morning, I realized it was close enuf to count as morning and just got up.
Thank goodness for the espresso machine! (Did I mention I go to bed at midnight?)Today I will, at the very least, pull the mattress off of the bed and onto the floor. It is like we live in a house with only 2 beds and 4 people! Ideally I will get the mattress off of the bed, tear the stupid thing down, and move both their beds into the same room. They will eventually have a room with their beds and a room with their clothes and toys. Tonight they will have a room with all of Corn Niblet's things...and a mattress on the floor for Sweet Pea! Hopefully this will be the end to my sleeping woes, and to my half mad daydreams of a ceremonial bed burning where I'm dancing around the burning bed in my nightie chanting sleep inducing prayers!
But after the big move of furniture, I will then be posting my musings on sharing; when after months of them fighting over their things in their shared rooms, I have taken a large black marker and wrote their names on everything they own (including across their foreheads)! But then again, there is always hope that my family will eventually learn to act more like the perfect family I dreamed I would always have!