Additional Sleep Deprivation

I'm loosing valuable sleep right now, but I have to loose it sometime I suppose, if I'm ever to post again.

My boys have been tag-teaming me again. All of them. Grandma came home, and for the two days thereafter I got 12 and 10 hours of sleep, respectively. It was great!! But then the boys changed their minds. (Insert tears, real ones.) Alexander has - ironically - been the one to sleep more. Christopher, however, has been driving me crazy. He seems to have developed some phobia of sleeping or something. When I have been successful in getting him to sleep, it's after hours and hours of fighting with him over it, and him begging for me to sleep with him or for more food or one more movie or one more..... you name it. Whatever he can think of to avoid sleeping. And if you think just leaving him in bed works: It doesn't. I've tried that too, and he honestly will just stay there awake until unfathomable hours of the morning, like 4 and 5 am. And the problem with this is that I hear him and I therefore don't sleep, or if I doze off I dont' sleep well because every little sound wakes me up. I'm not a light sleeper, except when I hear my boys. I've slept through Bryan sleep-talking and I can sleep through the racket the neighbors make, but when the boys stir, I'm up. Dratted that mommy-sense!

I realized last night that I have reached the dreaded stage of hating to go to sleep. I'm so exhausted that I actually don't WANT to sleep because it WILL require that I wake up! And I dread waking up because I'm never ready to wake up, so I dread going to sleep in the first place. Granted, I still go to sleep of course, but I don't really like it right now. It's not a respite, it's a survival mechanism.

After two days in which I got a grand total of about 3 hours of sleep in 30 minute increments, yesterday I ran out of rocks. "Rocks?" I hear you ask. Well, for those of you who know about the rocks, I hope you're laughing. For those who don't, suffice it to say that it's a parable for having enough emotional reserves. And I ran clean out of rocks yesterday. I felt it set in about 2pm. Alexander was screaming his head off (he screamed so much that he went hoarse by the end of the day), and I picked him up and just stood there. That was when I knew it: I was out of rocks. I'd spent them all on others and I didn't have a single one left. I spent the second half my day trying not to cry. Around 1am I cried anyway and Bryan came to my rescue. He let me put noise-canceling headphones on, turn on the BYU radio station, and ignore the crying baby and Christopher's incessant train of "I want"s. It wasn't pleaseant, but man was it necessary!

Why was Alexander screaming, you wonder? And why was Christopher still up? Alexander sleeps overnight, waking up every 1.5 - 2.5 hours to eat. During this time I put him in an oversized diaper because changing him wakes him up, and I don't want that. This only works because he doesn't poop until morning when he wakes up. And yesterday for some reason he didn't poop at all the whole day. And he was mad about it. I bounced him, patted him, squeezed him, bathed him, gave him a massage.... and then I ran out of ideas and just let him cry. He also threw up on me a ton yesterday. But he was eating normally, so we figure he wasn't hungry, and that he was probably just uncomfortable. Today he's eating normally, and he pooped on me 3 times in thirty minutes. Oh well.

As to why Christopher was awake: He went to bed nicely at about 9. He slept for.... ready for it? .... He slept for 30 minutes and then woke up. And would NOT go back to sleep. He lay down when asked, but he wouldn't sleep. And he wiggled. And eventually he got up and I didn't stop him. When I finally gave up and went to bed at almost 4am, he was still awake. Bryan, by the way, was also awake and helping me all this time. And this is not the first time this week that Christopher's done this. Both of us are exhausted. And if you think that he's doing this because we let him nap or sleep late, think again. I've tried getting him up at 7-ish in the morning, wearing him out during the day, stuffing him full at night, and he has still done this. I still love him, but boy oh boy is it frustrating! Not to mention that it adds to the previously mentioned problem of dreading to go to sleep because I know he'll be up again.

Oh, and one last thing about sleep deprivation. Actually, more than one thing. First thing: It's really bad for you. Ok, there, got that out of the way. Second: One of the other things I hate about it is that if I'm not in the room with the baby (like, if I don't sleep in my own bed) he doesn't hear me and therefore sleeps deeper and longer. If I sleep in my bed, he hears me and wakes up MUCH more often. It frustrates me that he'll sleep through Christopher in the other room screaming and crying, but he won't sleep through me rolling over in my sleep. I still love him, but I could use some infant earplugs I think.

I was going to make this post about all kinds of random things, but it turned into this instead.


**Addendum: It's a few days later, and I asked Bryan if I could pretty please nap today. So at about 10:00 I put the baby down for a nap and told Bryan I was going to sleep. Assuming that I was actually going to get some sleep, I crashed HARD and was sleeping very deeply..... for about 30 minutes. Between 10 and noon, I was woken up 4 times. And then I admitted defeat and got out of bed. No naps here.