Seasons Of Love

You're It

A/N - I promise this book has not been abandoned :) I'm busy with my Flufftober book right now but I have a whole document of notes for the Fortune-Knight family I can't wait to get started on fully once that is over. Thanks for sticking around while I make sure I write the best stories I can for this little family. And as always if there's something you want to see just let me know, I love requests! <3 

If there was one thing that Autumn and Winter were used to it was their late nights. Even though Winter had always been a morning person after; meeting Autumn he just got used to staying up late because he wanted to spend as much time with her as possible. Their nights only got later when Rose came along. They had decided to take turns on night feeds so that they weren't both as exhausted all the time but they were both so enamored with their little girl that they both ended up awake every time she was awake so they could soak in every minute with her. Obviously the adjustment could have been so much worse, they were already night people and they thought it would only be a couple months, maybe a year, of nights like that and then they could settle into a more normal sleep schedule again.

They could not have been more wrong. There were about two months right before Rose turned one that bedtime went perfectly. She would be asleep by 7:30 and sleep all through the night. Every so often they would hear her on the baby monitor, but mostly it was just sleep noise. She hardly ever really needed them. Looking back, Winter and Autumn really wished they had savored those days and gotten some good sleep instead of staring at the cameras all night to make sure their daughter was okay because as she got older it became more clear that she was also a little night owl. Just like her mother. It was always a struggle to get Rose to sleep for the night. Even on nights when everything seemed to go to plan; where she settled down quickly and seemed to be asleep before her parents even finished reading; it was inevitable that she would turn up at their bedroom door thirty minutes later asking for cuddles or another story or some water.

Rose just had so much energy all the time. The couple knew they should have expected this. Even though they were both incredibly calm adults in comparison to some of the other people around them, they both were quite rowdy as children. Winter's parent's loved to make the joke that he didn't sit down for the first three years of his life. Whether he was giving full performances of his parents favorite songs complete with his little microphone, choreography, and guitar that he absolutely believed he knew how to play or running around the back garden making up his own little plays; he was always on the move. Autumn had always been quiet but when she was very young she was still quite animated. Before her mum left she put Autumn in dance class from a very young age. She immediately regretted picking tap classes when her three year old daughter insisted on demonstrating what she learned in class and proceeded to run in circles stomping her feet to make the shoes tap.

Now they had a daughter with more energy than either of them had combined. Neither of them ever wanted to dampen that spirit, Autumn's father had done that to her and she refused to repeat that cycle with Rose, but they did wish that it had an off button sometimes. One that they could use between the hours of 9PM and 6AM.

Autumn had consulted every parenting book and website she could find to look for any tricks they could use to help their little girl sleep. For weeks they worked their way through an entire list of ideas they found. They took her on long late night car rides; but she just stayed up to sing along loudly to the music they hoped would calm her. They tried warm baths before bed time, gave her warm milk, tried massages, limited screen time, and played relaxing music in her room. Nothing worked. The one thing that every resource warned against was exercising before bed, but after talking with Winter's parents they realized that maybe the books didn't know what was right for every kid. When Winter was young sometimes they just needed to let himself tire out before bed and, as it turned out, that was just what Rose needed too.