Ear Plugs

My son has a long history of sleep problems.

Back when I worked from home, I was usually the one who would get out of bed in the middle of the night when Kai knocked on our bedroom door because he couldn’t sleep. I’d take him back to his room and tucked him in, and many times I ended up sleeping in the extra bed in his bedroom rather than continuing to get up when he still couldn’t sleep.

When I started commuting to work downtown, my wife told Kai that he would have to stay in bed as Dad would be too tired to wake up every night, and that he is such a sound sleeper that she would not hear him.

That seemed to work for a little while, as Kai stopped knocking on our bedroom door for a period of time.

But the past few months, the problem has re-emerged, and it’s now as bad as before. And now it’s my wife who usually gets up for Kai.

We have not been successful at finding a way for Kai to sleep better, so we have tried giving him incentives to not disturb us when he awakens in the middle of the night. He can earn 200 points for our Point Store every time he goes through the night without knocking.

But sometimes even that is not enough.

Sometimes he wants comfort after having a bad dream.

Other times he gets anxious after hearing noises outside.

“I can’t sleep.”

Why not?

“Those noises bother me.”

What noises? I don’t hear any noises.

“THOSE NOISES!”

Kai’s hearing is a lot more sensitive than ours. He hears snow plows, the wind, trucks traveling down the road a block away, and many other things.

And the problem isn’t so much that he hears those noises, but he becomes anxious when he does.

Ideally, we want him to be less anxious. And we are working on that.

But in the meantime, his therapist at school recommended we try ear plugs.



Personally, I hate ear plugs. I find them uncomfortable. I don’t like the feeling of them in my ears.

But we were surprised when Kai agreed to try them.

And even more surprised when he didn’t hate them right away.

The first night, he actually slept through the night. I don’t know if the ear plugs had anything to do with it since they fell out overnight. But perhaps he was less anxious because he had them.

Alas, the next night he was back to waking us up.

His leg hurt, he said.

Sigh.

He frequently complains of various aches and pains. Sometimes it is hard to believe that they are real problems.

But that is a topic for another day.

Maybe I need to try the ear plugs to see if it blocks out the sound of Kai trying to wake us up at 2AM.