S has had a bad week sleep-wise. Up several nights in the middle of the night this week, even though he still gets melatonin and Clonidine nightly to help with the sleep issues.
Last night the first of his two front baby teeth fell out. A combination of the excitement, the weird feeling of that gap, and his own body chemistry resulted in his waking up at 2 a.m. and never quite going back to sleep. I finally got up with him at 6:30 to prevent him from waking his brother with all that noise in his bedroom We have his doorknob turned around, so we can lock him in there at night to prevent him getting out of the house while we sleep, but he tends to lie awake in bed “chattering” away during these periods. And he’s pretty loud about it.
The whole sleep issue is one of those things that clearly illustrates to me a neurotransmitter imbalance component to his autism. We go through periods where he is fairly calm and will sleep the night through, but then a switch goes off and we go through periods where he is unable to shut his brain off long enough to get a full night’s sleep. Which means I don’t either. Sigh. 
