Headphones, or Going Away and Breaking Established Patterns Part 2

I don't know if this has happened to other families, but I assume that it has -- when you leave home for more than a few nights, your normally change-resistant child suddenly becomes flexible in adapting to the new circumstances. 

One memorable instance of this in our life happened when Singularity was almost four years old. I was still nursing him, though we had been struggling over working on weaning him for over a year. Up to a point, I didn't mind, as I thought that he still needed it, but eventually I was ready to stop. Singularity resisted. 

Then we went to visit my parents in Pennsylvania, and Singularity just forgot about it. He didn't mention it once in over a week. When we got home, he looked kind of confused and asked to do it again, but I told him that we didn't do that any more. And that was that. 

Flash forward almost six years: I have been trying for years to convince Singularity that he did not need to sleep in his headphones. Really, it is quiet in his bedroom at night. Unexpected noises at night are rare. I even had a conversation with Singularity's pediatrician about it, as I had become concerned that years of intensive headphones wearing was going to affect the growth of Singularity's head and jaw. (The pediatrician wasn't worried.) But Singularity resolutely insisted on donning the headphones as part of his bedtime routine. . . 

. . . until we went to visit my parents last month, when it was quite warm. I don't know if Singularity was hot, just forgot to put the headphones on, or a little bit of both, but for most of that visit he did not wear the headphones to sleep. Back home, he wants to wear them again when he remembers, but he usually forgets, so I have just been leaving them tucked away unobtrusively in a corner of his tent. 

I don't think that I have ever shown Singularity's bed to the blog: 

Yes, Singularity sleeps in an old Ikea kiddie tent on top of his bed. According to one of our ABA therapists, it is not uncommon for kids on the autism spectrum or with sensory issues to prefer to sleep in the more enclosed space of a tent. Singularity also sleeps under a full-length body pillow.

But I digress. I think that the Singularity will probably stop wearing the headphones to bed sometime soon. And then it will be time to start working on the next thing, or at least planning for what to change on the next trip we take!