A Long Line of Expletives ...

Lola is head-strong, in addition to being body strong, so when she declares NO! she means it. And that declaration has emerged at bedtime. Twice in the past four days, Lola has refused to let her parent go when we went through the bedtime routine. No amount of consoling worked and both times resulted in Lola's climbing / falling out of her bed. Insert loud and forceful expletives here. Tonight's incident was much worse than the previous one. Not only did she get out of her crib, but she came into the living room twice. We audibled to setting up a cot in her room and she happily laid down on it, but if we left the room then so did she. Eventually we just shut the door on her. She opened it and came out, we caught her and returned her to her cot, calmed her down and walked away, only to repeat the same process two more times. The final action was to have Eric barricade the door while Krystal sat next to the cot and tried to convince Lola to lie down on it. Then I sat next to her for 10 minutes until she was goodly asleep.

Lola's night terrors make this situation even worse. Lola screams out -- terrified, horrible screams, sometimes also shouting "NO! NO!" -- each night. She calms down immediately if a parent comes in and tells her everything's okay and to go back to sleep; she promptly lies down, is covered up, and that's that. Those parent-child interactions last about 10 seconds, but each one leaves me jarred and anxious. Last night saw five separate incidents, plus a very early morning wake-up call from Lola as well.

We put in an order for toddler sleep books from Amazon; here's hoping that at least one useful idea comes from them. Poor Lola, and poor Lola's parents.