Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

Sleep deprivation sounds like a joke. Sometimes it turns into a dick-size contest, especially around new parents: “I only got 5 hours of sleep last night.” “Yeah, I know what you mean, I only got 4.” Like it’s a point of pride that you’re up and functioning after being deprived of sleep.

It is in fact more serious than that. Here’s a partial list of sleep depreivation symptoms. Here’s a short essay on the subject.

Ever since the baby came, hub and I have been sleep deprived. She is just one of those kids who doesn’t sleep well on her own, and at 18 months still doesn’t regularly sleep through the night. I’m what you call a “delicate” sleeper anyway – I have a hard time falling asleep, and if something wakes me up, I have a hard time going back to sleep. The net effect is that for the past 18 months, I’ve been averaging around 4-5 hours of sleep a night. Hub gets a tiny bit more than that. Still not enough.

Of course this tends to make us irritable, and since we work out of the house we are around each other and the children all day, every day, with very few breaks. We’ve never had a babysitter. Occasionally, maybe once a month, the kids go to stay with their grandparents for a couple of days.

To make a long story less long, things have been really rough around here lately. Bad news rough. We’re working hard now to try to get the kids on a better schedule, but it’s the little one who’s the problem. She wakes up at 5 in the morning and won’t go back to sleep in her own bed, so she ends up sleeping with us and beats the crap out of me all night. She almost broke my nose 2 weeks ago. Last week she broke my glasses while thrashing in her sleep. She’s slowly becoming very attached to her stuffed dog and her quilt and I hope that she will be able to use them to comfort herself back to sleep instead of needing to come to bed with us.

In the meantime, if hub or I snap at you, don’t take it too personally.

Posted Kids, Rants |