These past two (and a half) months have been two of the hardest months of my life. Or rather, two months of the hardest nights of my life. I guess when you have kids you expect sleepless nights...at least at the beginning. I expected to be awake every 2-3 hours and eventually gain more and more sleep as they grow older. But we learned, rather quickly, from Joel that kids do not sleep through the night on a regular basis. Yes, children wake up at night...sometimes even two or three times. But what I never expected was these last two and half months.
Let me tell you about the last two and half months of our lives. We have had ear infections, crazy amounts of teething (we've gone from 2 to 8 teeth in two months), stitches, growth spurts (a minimum 3 lbs gain), never-ending colds, bad gas and the inevitable stranger anxiety stage. Oh, and that's just Micah. Which has led to months of bad sleep. I can handle waking up every 2-3 hours. But waking up every 45 minutes to hour and a half has really started to wain. Literally we have had sleep in 45 minutes increments for the last two months. And its been exhausting.
I've been told to "cherish" these moments. I have...sort of. But let's be honest. I can only cherish this time with him so much. After about a month of him waking every 45 minutes, the cherishing was OVER. I was frustrated and exhausted. I stopped praying for "sleep" and began getting a lot more specific. Two hours God. Please just two solid hours. Literally I was done. Done with getting 45 minutes of sleep in a two hour period. I was done with his pain. I was done with the tears. I was done with the colds. I was done with him growing. One night, I literally fed him every 45 minutes. And it was a FULL feed every time. That night, I lost 1.5 pounds (probably the only upside of the whole situation).
There is only so much "understanding" one person can have. One night, when Dan and I were so exhausted that we couldn't handle it anymore, we let him cry in his crib (which is in our room). We both fell asleep, listening to his cries and woke up two hours later to Micah still crying (we were in and out of sleep so we know it was constant).
We tried Tylenol and Advil to help him with the pain. Both have adverse hyperactive effects on him and don't necessarily mean he'll sleep. It would soothe him enough that we could finally put him down (at least for a few minutes). We went through bottles of the stuff. Why they make such tiny bottles and charge an arm and a leg for them, I'll never know. Nothing seemed to soothe this little baby. He was in agony. I felt bad, I really did. But I was just too drained to care. I just needed sleep. My only saving grace is that Dan would let me sleep in from whenever the boys woke up, till about 8am. Sometimes it was the only constant hour of sleep I would get in a night. It was the only way I could still function as a "decent" mom.
Do you know how much sleep deprivation affects your daily life? Simple tasks would take hours. Composing an email with three sentence would take 45 minutes. Part of that was used to focus and the other half was used to "stay awake" and on task. One morning, Dan took a "sick" day and stayed home. We dropped the kids off at my mom's and went home to sleep. Now I know why they say that driving tired is like driving drunk. That morning, I should NOT have been driving. Literally, my peripheral vision was blurring. But those three hours were enough to get us through the next month of sleepless nights.
I have written this post every night (sometimes multiple times a night) for months. But by the time the kids are sleeping, my brain is mush and I can't remember what I've wanted to say. Sleeplessness is hard.
Its hard on your body. Its hard to be motivated to exercise when you are so tired. Its hard to eat well when cookies give you the burst of energy you need to make it through the next hour. Its hard to be motivated to cook nutritious food when you have no energy. Those cookies got me through some hard times and gave me the motivation I needed in order to cook a healthy meal for the boys.
Sleeplessness is hard on your marriage. When your brain is in a constant fog, its hard to communicate. I've found it difficult to think of words and get frustrated when Dan doesn't understand what I'm saying. Or even when I don't understand what I'm saying. It hard to love one another when you are too tired to do anything but sleep. Sleep ALWAYS wins out. (Do you know how amazing an extra hour is when you get 4 hours a night???? And that's VERY interrupted sleep. That hour is a God-send).
Sleeplessness is hard on your parenting. You have a short temper. Those little quirks that you can handle normally seem like the most annoying thing. I've yelled more than I ever have before. I've been frustrated more. I've repeated the phrase, "Why are you so annoying? Oh ya, its because you are two..." more than I care to share. We've thrown educational play out the window and concentrate on staying awake during the day.
These past months have been hard. And I can probably write that without crying only because we've been sleeping in 3 hour increments for about a week now.People would ask me how I was doing and it would take every last reserve of energy not to burst into tears out of sheer exhaustion. I don't know how we've done it. I am amazed at our strength. I am amazed that we still have two (living) children. I just hope that this chapter of our lives is done. It might just take the rest of my life to make up that sleep deficit.
Dear God, thank you for sleep. Three hours of continuous sleep feels soooo amazing.
