Sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale, doesn’t it? Like there’s this cute little boy who just wouldn’t sleep, and all the townspeople tried everything they knew, and finally, there was some miracle cure such as giving him a special blanket, and he snuggled all down and did not awaken until morning.

Well, at my house, we’re living the nightmare version of the fairytale. The version where there is no happy ending. The version where Mom and Dad are at their wit’s end, and the cute little boy is looking less and less cute as the days go by.

The little boy at our house has autism along with several other diagnoses including something similar to Parkinson’s – something that messes with the dopamine in his system. He’s got some ADHD, and he’s got a learning disability, and he’s got a few other various and sundry diagnoses. However, the boy’s worst and most upsetting diagnosis is insomnia.

This child will go to sleep at the beginning of the night. He stays on a strict routine, and he goes to bed, settles down and goes to sleep. But he does not stay asleep. And although he’s afraid of the dark in most cases, he’s not afraid of it when he gets up out of his bed. Sleepwalking, you say? Nope – he remembers everything he does while roaming the house with everyone else tucked away in their beds, including Mom and Dad.

We’ve done everything we can to “Ethan-proof” the house, as we call it. There’s a lock on the pantry. If my husband doesn’t sleep with the key in his pocket, the child (with stealth skills) will sneak into our room and get the key and use it. We have a lock on the refrigerator. Same scenario. And if anything is left out in the open, you might as well kiss it good-bye before you retire for the night because he’s going to eat it while you sleep.

Just recently – 10 cupcakes and approximately 40 Oreos plus a gallon of milk that he used to wash it all down. He’s had ice cream in his room, and recently he ran through five pounds of apples by taking a two to three bites out of each apple.

We’ve tried it all. We’ve put him in our room. He snuck out. I’ve tied ribbon around his waist and tied the other end to my wrist. He shimmied out of the ribbon, went and did what he needed to do and then shimmied back into it without waking me. After he fooled me, I tied him to his father. Same story. He asked to be tied to our 100 pound dog just to see what would happen. Our dog doesn’t like to have his sleep disturbed. I’m almost desperate enough to do it, but I’m afraid our child would be a snack for the dog.

We bought motion detectors that make sounds and put them on the stairs to signal us when he was coming down them. He’s managed to disengage them during the day when we weren’t aware. When we put them back together, he managed to climb around them without setting them off.

We even bought a Halloween skull that had a motion detector on it. We put it in the refrigerator and giggled when we thought about him opening the door in the middle of the night to find a skull right at eye level that began moving and talking: “I’ve been waaaaaitttting on you! Ha ha ha ha ha!”

Well, the joke was on us. He got up that night, opened up the refrigerator and picked up the skull. Then he set it on the kitchen counter and went about his business. My husband heard him yell, “I’M NOT LISTENING TO YOU!” in the middle of the night that night, and he forgot about the skull and thought that Ethan was talking in his sleep. He wasn’t. He was just talking back to the skull, which was still detecting his movements from the kitchen counter.

We’re all out of ideas. Short of wedging him between the two of us in OUR bed, duct taping him into his bed or locking him in his room (several ideas suggested to us by the five other children in our home), we’ve done all we know to do. Having him sleep in our bed would make us unhappy. Duct tape and locks would probably get us some attention from DSS that we don’t want. So, in the meantime, we’re hoping somebody else has some good ideas.

How do you keep the insomniac child in his bed, in his room, and where he’s supposed to be?

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Categories: *Are All of Those Yours?! by Stephanie Trevitz, All Articles, Hot Topics, Parents Panel
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