This week was NOT a good week to get the kids to school on time

Getting the kids to school on time. It’s a challenge a lot of parents face. It was a struggle getting Jennifer to school on time for a while when she first started kindergarten; we had to go through several different systems until we settled on one that worked. With Jesse, it’s the same challenges in the mornings: Trying to keep him focused on getting ready to go to school, not taking an hour or so to eat his breakfast and actually getting dressed instead of sitting on the bed, in his birthday suit, looking at a book.

We’re working on it, and I DO make it an effort to get them there on time (or, in Jesse’s case, at a REASONABLE time where he is not too early or too late). But sometimes, there are factors out of my control preventing that from happening.

One of those factors was my alarm clock.

Because hubby and I are both deaf, we have one of those special alarm clocks for the deaf and hard-of-hearing that vibrate the mattress when the alarm goes off. It also flashes the lamp on and off but we have it set to just vibrate.

But it seems like it’s time to replace this same alarm clock that hubby has had for years, because we’ve had problems with it. It wouldn’t work!

And on the mornings it didn’t work – that it didn’t go off – those were times I woke up later than usual and had to RUSH to get Jen to the bus or school. And sometimes, she was late for both.

Also this week, Jesse has been having what I strongly suspect are night terrors. He wakes up in the middle of the night crying, screaming and acting like he’s trying to run away or escape from some monster. He is just terrified. Last night, it was REALLY bad; he was running around the house crying and screaming, and when Jennifer or I tried to talk to him or calm him down, it was like he didn’t recognize us or hear our voices. It was like he was in a waking dream, moreso when he kept trying to climb the walls and scratch at the door. (Jennifer often woke up from this since Jesse was also screaming and sometimes my husband would be home when it happened). It has been horrible and last night it was scary. Sometimes he’d wake up more than once. Which meant we hardly got any sleep! (One thing that put a stop to them on certain evenings is if I let him sleep in my bed with me and I had to leave the light on.) So that, too, has been a problem. We’d all be zombies the next morning because we hardly got enough sleep!

And that slowed down the whole process of getting ready for school and out the door.

But I’m hoping things will start to look up. Got my alarm clock to work this morning(yay!) and I hope it will continue to work. As to Jesse, we are going to work on the nighttime thing. Jennifer had night terrors, too, when she was a toddler but it was never that bad and it went away after a while. This has been going on for some time with Jesse, but more often this week than normal. So we’re going to try to work on resolving this. I definitely need to make his bedroom safer so he doesn’t get hurt the next time it happens.

I hope next week will be better.