Bedtime battle

Cooper is a great little traveler. He's adaptable when we travel either by plane or by car. He loves that he gets to sleep in bed with me, or in the same room if not in the same bed, when we do travel.  But when we get home from a trip he doesn't want to return to sleeping in his own room and bed. We've been giving in and letting him sleep with us because we've been so exhausted and had no fight in us. But this has only served to create a bigger problem for when we finally needed to get him back into his own bed/room. 

You might ask what's the harm in him sleeping with us and honestly I ask myself that nightly. But, he is a pinwheel when he sleeps, extending his arms and legs and pushing on us as he turns every which way. We have a king sized bed and Bob and I end up teetering on the edge of said bed while Cooper takes over the entire bed!  Then he is up multiple times demanding liquids to drink (another issue we're addressing now) followed by subsequent wakings for diaper changes.  We need more sleep so we're putting a stop to this craziness now.

So, on night #2 of Operation Get Cooper Back in His Own Bed this is the hallway outside of his bedroom where there is a baby gate installed in his doorway to keep him from escaping:

For two consecutive nights, Cooper has waged a bedtime battle that involves picking up and throwing just about anything he is strong enough to lift and hurl overhead.  He nearly pulled out the drawers of his dresser so we had to remove those tonight to ensure he didn't pull them onto himself. The dresser itself (along with all other large furniture pieces) is tethered to the wall because we live in earthquake country so at least we know he can't pull the furniture onto himself. 

Since we use glass baby bottles for Cooper at night and he's decided to throw things, we are now also engaged in the bottle elimination - can't take the risk that he'll hurl that and break it and cut himself or us. So, he's not a happy kid at night right now and we're not getting much sleep in this house this week.  We were going to save the bottle elimination for the holiday break but I'm hoping and praying that now that we've begun both these changes (poor kid) we'll be past this stage by the time we get to Christmas and maybe we can have a truly restful holiday break from work and the night time craziness around here. I'll certainly be praying for that and would appreciate your prayers for that too. 

I have to say that before this craziness began this week, Cooper really had not exhibited much of the "terrible 2s" style tantrums - he's been a really happy and well behaved kid. I hope we see a return to that soon ;).