In keeping with my future career aspirations as Captain Obvious, I thought I'd tell parents out there something they already know. Ready? Here goes; a sleep deprived, overly tired kid is as well mannered as an underfed, moderately agitated badger with a sore tooth. Now don't overwhelm me with letters of gratitude lauding my insightful brilliance. Your undying devotion will suffice. But, in all seriousness, that less than mystical wisdom serves a point that I'll get to eventually in this article.
My rediscovery of the wisdom I shared above came during a summer family vacation. With wife, two kids and a pair of in-laws in tow, I set off for a beach vacation with visions of forming a new family tradition that would be deeply cherished and oft repeated. Usually my wife interjects a bit of sanity into my visions because she knows from experience that things rarely go as I think they will. This time around she was asleep at the wheel.
See, I often have visions. Unfortunately, whatever part of my brain is responsible for coming up with visions is a bit short-sighted. Actually, it's more myopic in the same sense that water is a bit wet. My vision center is effectively blind. Stevie Wonder blind. Also a little bit deaf and it has extremely poor fashion sense. I digress. The point is, I'm so prone to over-indulging fantasies of perfection that it should come as no surprise that my plan to birth fond memories during the first event in what would be a long tradition fell mostly flat on its face. Why? Glad you asked.
See, having kids, I know they can be royal nightmares when they don't get enough sleep. My wife will tell you I'm not any better when sleep deprived and I'm not going to pretend she's exactly Pollyanna when the Sandman skips our house at night either. Knowing all of this, you'd think I would have investigated our destination more thoroughly and determined in advance that there weren't enough beds to accommodate all six of us. But I didn't.
The inevitable result of my excess enthusiasm getting in the way of my common sense was that all four members of my family shared one bed while my brother and sister-in-law lounged comfortably on a bed together. This is where I should interject another brilliant gem of wisdom - kids are astoundingly mobile sleepers and exceptionally accurate kickers - a fact I discovered in the wee hours of our first cramped night sharing a bed thanks to my son's knee taking the initiative to ensure I'm henceforth incapable of reproducing any more children.
Now all you need to really round out this Wes Craven version of a family vacation is the fact that I am the most talented snorer you're likely to ever meet and my wife sometimes suffers from night terrors when stressed, overly fatigued and/or sleeping in a strange place. With that you can begin to connect the dots and imagine just how fantastic my dream vacation at the beach turned out. Let me grab the crayon for a sec and I'll creatively color in some of the highlights.
As already mentioned, night one involved my son kneeing me in the groin. I mention that first because, to a guy, that's the most significant kneeing you can experience so it deserves first billing. But, I'd be failing in the full disclosure area if I didn't mention that he also kicked me in one shin, elbowed me in the ribs and scratched my other shin with a toenail that was promptly trimmed the following morning despite his protests. On top of all of that, my wife also elbowed me in the ribs a few times to stop me from snoring. You can guess, folks, that I wasn't exactly a bundle of flowers and cuddly bunny fur the next morning. My wife and the brood were no more pleasant than I, though in my self-indulgent misery, I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the heck they were complaining about.
Our second night was much like the first only the family jewels were spared any additional mauling. But, to keep it interesting, my wife and I had invested so much of our day on the beach worrying about sun screen for our kids that we neglected ourselves. So knees in the groin were replaced with sunburns. There were also further kicks to the shins, elbows to the ribs and a brief hushed argument in which my wife complained about my snoring and I spit back that, absent a constructive suggestion to fix the problem, she could go jump of a pier.
Hugs, smiles and laughter were notably absent on day three. What little conversation we exchanged consisted mostly of trying to guess what hard, foreign objects the owner of the rental beach house might be hiding in the mattress we were sleeping on. Seriously, if there's a large supply of missing rocks and gravel somewhere in the US, I know exactly where it's being stored. We all slept longer that night out of pure exhaustion but weren't any better rested the next morning. And that's where the results of too little quality sleep really began to show in my kids.
My son, Nick, is an adventurous sort. He's full of questions, always in motion and inevitably tests boundaries to see what he can get away with before threats of time-out begin to surface. Ordinarily, I encourage him to explore his creative excesses because I think it's healthy. But when Nick doesn't get enough sleep, testing boundaries takes on new meaning. When he's tired, he tests boundaries in the same way Genghis Khan tested the military resolve of his neighbors by slaughtering all of them. I mean to say that Nick experiments with limits in the same way Saddam Hussein experimented with a minor border incursion into Kuwait. And God help you if you aren't mentally prepared or well rested yourself because you will need ALL your faculties primed and intact to deal with Nick when he gets that way.
Needless to say, after three days of horrid sleep on the cramped and crowded surface of the iron maiden of all mattresses, my wife and I were in no way equipped to deal with Nick. Thankfully, we had a solution in the form of my brother and sister-in-law. We begged them to baby-sit. After all, they'd been sleeping fine in their own room. What I mean to say is we pathetically threw ourselves on their mercy and asked them to watch the kids for just a few hours so my wife and I could get out of the house and have a brief brush with sanity, a quiet, childless dinner and a moment to recharge before facing The Beast (Nick's nickname) again. Fools... er...friends that they are, they agreed.
After an all too short respite, my wife and I returned to the beach house to find it in a nearly post-apocalyptic state. If you're picturing the final scene in the original Planet of the Apes where Charlton Heston finds part of the statue of liberty sticking out from the sand or something out of a Mad Max movie, you've pretty much captured the damage my kids were able to do while we were gone.
My usually prim and put-together sister-in-law greeted us at the door, one naked and kicking child under one arm and the other crying somewhere in the background, with the most perfect lunatic asylum escapee face you've ever seen on a woman. Her husband glanced at us as we entered, walked past us without a word and stormed out onto the deck where he began a stormy and very serious relationship with a bottle of scotch, pausing only long enough to console his wife when she joined him and broke down in tears. As for my wife and I, we began the tremendous challenge of cleaning up with an abundance of guilt and embarrassment between us.
Now I'd love to tell you we somehow salvaged everything, turned all of this around and ended our trip on a high note. I'd be lying. The closest we came to any high notes were the glass-shattering screams my daughter regularly unleashed on us in one of her rare-form tantrums and the blood-curdling horror movie night-terror shriek my wife let out at 3:30 AM on night five (waking the entire household and some shocked and frightened neighbors too) due to the stressed conditions and lack of sleep.
Day six and a 3 hour drive saw us safely home. We'd cut our trip short by a day (our only smart move of the whole trip) and, once safely back on home turf, each went our separate ways for the remainder of the day before finally crawling off for the first good night of sleep in a week in our comfy, luxurious and oh-so-spacious beds.
Now this needlessly lengthy retelling of a trip I'm sure some of you can relate to wasn't entirely because I love to write long articles. The main reason was to finally get to the point that, with a little forward thinking and very little extra money spent, I could have avoided the entire mess. All it would have required would have been a couple inexpensive inflatable mattresses for the kids. Ok, maybe an extra mattress pad for "The Grinder," which is the moniker we assigned to the horrid bed of back-mangling agony we'd enjoyed on our trip, but mostly the air mattresses because they'd have allowed us all the extra room we needed to spread out and sleep more comfortably.
The entire event and the simple solution I discovered in hindsight, believe it or not, resulted in what I can only describe as a rebirth. It spawned the purchase of a high-end air mattress bed for our own home, the purchase of travel air mattresses for the kids and even inspired me to create an entire blog devoted to air mattresses of all kinds. But, mostly, our excruciatingly painful week at the beach taught me that as long as nature continues refusing to provide us with instruction manuals on raising our kids, we really have to step up to the plate and use that slab of jelly between our ears to plan ahead or face the consequences.
Now if you'll excuse me, Nick just walked by my home office dragging some rope and a pipe wrench behind him. Something tells me I should probably look into that.
If you've learned a lesson from my experience and are interested in a kids air mattress such as the wonderful aerobed for kids or several other reviewed models, please visit me at the airmattressbedsguide.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Holiday
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