Month: May 2012

Update

Some of you must be really
powerful pray-ers. Scary powerful. Last night after doing
nothing different (except for that half cup of chamomile tea before
bed) I put baby girl to bed (normal read/pray/sing/relax) and she
fell asleep in less than 10 minutes. That hasn’t happened in over a
month. No screaming, no crying.
I don’t believe that the chamomile
flower has sedating properties equal to Valium or Ambien so it must
be that people were praying she would shut the heck up and go to
sleep. Thank you. Seriously. I was losing my mind (as you could
probably tell).
It was only 8:10 when I carefully
peeled myself from her bed and I was so far ahead of “schedule”
that I not only had time to read to Carter (we’re almost to the
Quarter Quell – I can’t wait to see what he thinks about that
twist), but I told Caleb a Dream Fairy Dear story (a character
created by my grandma that gives children loads of candy), and
edited Calvin’s online newspaper for Language Arts class. By the time
the kids were all in bed it was 9:30 and since Josh was out at guitar
practice (for the church worship team) I decided to Judge Judy myself
to sleep nice and early to get in as much rest as I could before
Camille started yelling.
My eyes popped open at 6:30. Wait,
what? There’s no baby body in my bed. Oh my gosh, I hope she didn’t
die. After all that complaining I did about her not sleeping,
published for the world to see . . . but a tiptoed investigation
showed that she was still asleep. After 680 days, it finally
happened. She slept all night. I went back to bed and sprawled out over my ½ of the bed that I had all to myself and smiled about
the fact that I was too awake to go back to sleep.
At 7 I got up to wake the boys for
school and as I passed her doorway she sat up and smiled. Who is this
human? Is this what 11 hours of rest looks like on her?
I was sure that she was my baby
and not some changeling that Dream Fairy Dear left in her place when
she showed her screamy, tired self by 8:30. As Josh said, “you
would have thought we’d get longer than an hour and a ½ out of a
full night’s sleep . . .”
Baby steps. 

mercy

I give, wave the white flag, surrender, not it, time out, freeze, throw in the towel, tap out  . . . how many different ways can I express that this baby girl is kicking my butt? I know some of you are under the mistaken impression that I’m super-mom or something because I have 4 kids, home schooled, did deployments and multiple moves, but Josh and I have met our match. That was all a piece of cake compared to this dress-wearing whirlwind.

You would think that with the 3 boys in school for the first time AND full time house help that this year would be a breeze, but there’s something about 2 years of cumulative sleep depravation that is really kicking our you-know-whats. Or maybe our parenting mojo got used up on the other three. Or maybe she broke us. All I know is we have deteriorated to this place: we went to Starbucks and Josh bought her a sucker so that she would sit in the stroller without screeching. She wasn’t screeching for a sucker, she was just screeching and he wanted to make it stop. I started to raise my eyebrows in protest and then I decided that I wanted her to stop screeching too and couldn’t think of any other way that didn’t involve complete chaos and broken mugs. It worked for about 5 minutes so I guess we can put a mark in the “win” column.

We really feel like our entire lives would be different if she would just SLEEP. We’ve tried it all: co-sleeping in our bed, co-sleeping in her bed, cry it out, stay up later, go to bed earlier, bath, books, singing routine, wear her out until she falls over in exhaustion . . . the only thing we haven’t tried are chemical sedatives. Josh keeps threatening to give her a shot of whiskey like they used to do “in the olden days.” I pointed out that in the olden days they only lived to be about 40, so they weren’t exactly the medical model I wanted to follow.

The past 3 days: one night she woke up screaming at midnight (Josh went and slept with her all night = no sleep for him because she thrashes around and goes in and out of sleep all night). The next night she woke up screaming around the same time so I slept with her (no sleep for me). Last night we spent over 2 hours trying to get her to go to sleep: Josh read and sang to her, 45 minutes later he gave up. Carter and I tackled phase two — Carter lies in bed with her, I sit in a chair and read The Hunger Games out loud — yes, I know it’s highly inappropriate for a 2 year, and also for a 10 year old probably, but it worked the past 2 nights. I told you, I’m desperate. Two and a 1/2 chapters later (45 minutes) she’s still trying to talk over me and she’s totally interrupting the part where Gale gets nabbed by the peacekeepers so I tell her “night night” and leave with Carter to finish reading in my room.

Screaming and weeping follows. Caleb comes into my room to ask if he can try to get her to sleep. Have at it son — may the force be with you. It wasn’t. At some point after 10 pm, she’s still screaming and yelling, “Daddy!” We decide the lesser of 2 evils is to bring her into our bed. See, lack of sleep is totally clouding our brains because all that resulted from that piece of genius is neither of us slept well.

Not only will she not go to sleep, or stay asleep, but she wakes up before 6am, yelling and bossing us around. According to the all-knowing internet, a kid her age should be getting between 12-14 hours of sleep per day. We figure she’s getting about 9, interrupted, crappy hours of sleep. Which means we’re getting less. Lots less.

In fact, 3 weeks after coming home from our Egypt trip, Josh and I are still so exhausted (we find ourselves falling asleep in the middle of the day without warning) that we realized we can’t do an Israel trip as a family and come back and move 2 days later. So our preliminary plan is that Josh will go to Israel with the older two boys and I’ll stay home with Camille and Caleb. Of course we made this plan right when I could have used a nap and right when Josh was waking up from a nap, so it’s possible that what sounded like a great plan in that mental state will seem completely off the wall a few days from now.

All I know is if she slept, she’d be happier. If she slept, I would be happier. If she were happier (and slept) I’d like her more. God have mercy on us.