It Turns Out that Hell is spelled F.O.U.R. A.M.

We made a big leap forward in the livability scale last night but boy was it a costly one. We finally moved Josie's crib into Lucy's room after a year of sharing our room with her and two weeks of Mitch and I sleeping on thermarests in the living room. We were worried that the move would disrupt Josie's new found ability to sleep solidly through the night without waking anyone up but we decided to forge ahead because both of us are tired of sleeping on the floor.

Well, it wasn't Josie that was distressed by the move. Despite months of advance warning and steady talking up of the idea, Lucy was none too pleased to have to share her palace with Josie. We managed to get through bedtime with no major hitches but Lucy woke up around midnight and started causing trouble. First it was the scary monsters (12:15 AM), then it was a sweater (1:30 AM), then it was the alligators (1:45 AM), then it was juice, "I WANT JUICE!!!!" (3 something AM). Finally around 4 AM I dragged her into the living room so that I could yell at her without waking up Josie. I gave Lucy some ultimatums (no Jungle book tomorrow if you don't shut up and go to sleep) while Mitch took Josie out of Lucy's room in anticipation of a giant Lucy screaming fit. I put Lucy back to bed and then she was quiet. She had won, Josie was out of her room.

Mitch and I had a mini parenting conference at 4:15 AM and decided that this wasn't good. So back into Lucy's room went Josie, with the added incentive to Lucy that if she was quiet and went back to sleep that in the morning Mitch would take her to store and she could pick out any stickers that she wanted.

Apparently, stickers weren't enough. Lucy started screaming at full decibel that she wanted juice. Then it degraded into screaming for Mama, and then just generalized enraged screaming. Josie amazingly slept through the ruckus for almost ten minutes and then it started. The loudest, most high pitched, incredible tandem screaming that our house has known. One of them would slack off and then the other would really shine through.

The only fortunate thing that a person can say about it is that it only lasted for about ten minutes. And then we were able to get in our three hours of sleep before Josie woke us up in the morning. Ah parenting. We're all looking forward to tonight, not.