What Sleep???

I can't believe Josh is almost five months old. I'm tired. It isn't the kind of tired like after one night of staying up late, it is the kind of tired that is always lingering. Nights are not so bad, I try to go to bed early - usually no later than 10:30. Michael usually does Josh's first feeding which can be anywhere between 10:30 and 1:00. I usually hear the guys and if it seems like Josh is exceptionally pissed I'll get up and make a bottle or do what I can to help. Josh goes back to sleep pretty easily and then wakes again around 3:00 or 4:00 for another snack. For a while he would be wide awake after the last feeding. I'd put him into his crib and he'd look up at me and his face would light up with a smile. He's gotten better and goes back to sleep right after his big gulp. Then at around 5:00 or 5:30 he wakes up and we bring him into bed with us and he'll sleep until about 7:00 or 7:30.

Lucy sleeps great some nights - other nights she stirs frequently. Sometimes she has nightmares, her little stuffed Cookie Monster has been banished from the crib because she had a nightmare that Cookie ate her hand. She still talks about it and scrunches up her little face and holds out her hand and tells me, "Cookie ate my hand." Nightmares are the new thing since Josh was born. It is hard to say if it is having a new baby in the house or if it is just being two. Sometimes she needs a drink of milk. Sometimes she has to pee. Last night just after going to bed she was unsettled and asked Michael for a piñata. He told her she could have one at her third birthday party at Chuck-e-Cheese that she talks about constantly. Her little mind is working overtime these days and some nights she just is quick to stir. She also has been waking up at around 5:30 in the morning when it is pitch black. She is WIDE awake and if you tell her to go back to sleep she has a big screaming fit. Michael has been great and we try to alternate who gets up with Lucy and who sleeps in with Josh. I never in my lifetime thought it would feel like such an indulgence to sleep in until 7:00 - it feels soooooooo good.

When Lucy was a baby nights were awful. She woke frequently and she screamed and cried for hours on end. Even if I was in bed and Michael would get up with her I would lay in bed wide awake, my stomach in knots as I listened to her. We were exhausted. At one point I remember walking into the refrigerator - like I didn't see it in front of me and then wham! Michael had a big gash on his head that we couldn't for the life of us remember how he got it. We were all so tired that we practiced what we called "diving". Whenever we could, no matter what the circumstances were if Lucy went to sleep we both dove for the bed to catch some sleep ourselves. It didn't matter if we were in the middle of eating - plates would be abandoned on the table and we would dive. Just drank a pot of coffee - no sweat, I could be asleep in six seconds flat.

Lucy slept on me for a great part of her first year. I remember when she was around eight or nine months old she would only nap on me. At night she would eventually sleep best with us, so that is where she slept. I read books, I knew that we should "cry it out" but I didn't have the heart. I paid seventy-five dollars to have a sleep consultant say, "have you read Ferber? Okay, good so you know you have to have her cry-it-out." I wrote out a check and continued to let Lucy sleep with me, on me, holding my hand while she lay in her crib...whatever it took until she was about seventeen months old. Then I got pregnant and realized that I would eventually need a few months of sleep before the chaos would begin again. I rode the coattails of my friends consult with a colleague of the great Ferber himself and got the sleep situation under control.

So I am tired now, but not the bed-diving, open head wound kind of tired that I was with Lucy - but tired none-the-less. I go to bed every night and on my night table are two monitors buzzing and twinkling beside me. My sleep is fragmented, disjointed and I wake up feeling fuzzy most mornings. One night I counted how many times I was up and down out of bed between the hours of two and four and I stopped counting after eight. Today my brain is especially dull. But I know someday it will be a distant memory. Someday when Lucy and Josh are teenagers I'll be struggling to wake them up before noon on weekends and I won't remember sleeping for the first year of Lucy's life wearing my glasses.