Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

Let me preface this by saying that every single time we have plans to do something as a family, one or both of the children refuses to sleep the night before. Last night the baby didn’t get to sleep until 2, and she was up before 9.

Today we went to the lake. We packed up the kids and bathing suits and cooler and towels and snacks and headed out to Lake LBJ, where my brother and I are building a house. The baby screamed (bloodcurdlingly, at a volume setting of 11) all the way there.

I hadn’t seen the lakehouse since before they even staked out the foundation, and now it’s all framed up and they’re finishing putting on the raw roof. I don’t know what the technical term for the stage of completion is, but it was amazing to walk through the house and see in real life what I’d only seen on a piece of papar. I’m not the kind of girl who easily visualizes spatial references, so I just couldn’t picture what it was going to look like. I know now, and I can can sum it up in one word:

Huge.

Then I took the girls back to the car and started changing everyone’s clothes because like dunderheads we didn’t wear bathing suits on the way out there. The back doors of the Suburban swung shut on us. There I was trapped with 2 hot kids in the back of the car and no door handle to let us out easily. And I was naked from the waist down. Once I got some clothes on, I hauled my fat ass over the back seat with its accompanying kid carseats and let some fresh air into the car. Both girls had gotten prickly heat by this time.

We have a little beach area on our lot that the kids went wading in. The baby got her toes wet and started shivering. She’s like her mama – water’s only good when it’s 78 degrees or warmer. The 3 yo had to be dragged out of the water kicking and screaming. I think we know which one the water baby is.

We collected all the gear and loaded up the boat and got the life jackets on the kids which precipitated another round of screaming by the baby, who didn’t like her jacket. I could kind of understand that because it was the really uncomfortable kind of jacket that we had to wear on the cruise ship during the drill and I almost started hollering then, too.

So there we were in the boat, toting around a child who for all the world sounded like we were pulling out her toenails with pliers. People on the shore and other boats looked like they were about to call the cops on us. 2 minutes into our much-anticipated boat ride, we were pulling back in. The preparation took 3 times as long as the actual trip.

I think next time we’ll just have to get special toddler life vests. I even think they’ll enjoy boat rides. I’d expected the older one to freak out once we started moving, but she just grinned. She only told hub to slow down once. This is good news for our plans to buy a boat of our own.

I was pretty meh about the whole lakehouse thing, but now I’m really excited. I can’t wait for it to be finished. I have a feeling that we’ll start camping out in it as soon as they run water. Who needs carpet and paint?

4 yo: I’m gonna put my hand in your pocket, daddy.
Hub: Uh, ok. I wouldn’t do it if I were you, but I guess it’s ok.
4 yo: Look, daddy! My hand’s in your pocket!
Hub: Uh huh…
4 yo: Now I’m gonna put my hand in your grey pocket!
Hub Uh, ok… HOO! Wait, that’s my underwear!

I don’t know what to do anymore. The three year old won’t go to sleep and screams at the top of her lungs for an hour when it’s naptime or bedtime. The 18 month old wakes up 4 times in the night. I feel that I’m on the edge of some kind of breakdown. There’s something stretched constantly tighter inside of me and it’s straining and groaning towards a snap. I’m always on the verge of throwing up. My hands are shaking and I cry at the most inappropriate moments. I think I’m going crazy.

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.

The other day the baby wandered into the living room, unaccountably soaking wet from her shirt collar up. I asked her, as her hair dripped around her ears, what happened. She could only giggle. All I can figure is that she tried to dive into the dog’s water bowl.

I tried putting her to bed tonight around 9:30 because she hadn’t had a nap all day and she fell asleep. She woke back up around midnight and hasn’t been back to sleep yet.

I found out how to say “I love you” in babyese, since a baby told me she loves me.

“Eh suvv sum!”

That’s what I get for saying the baby doesn’t wake in the night anymore.

I noticed tonight that the three year old’s teeth are really grody. We have to practically tie her up in order to brush them and she whips her head back and forth and so the job never gets done very well. It’s showing now because she’s got more tartar than Red Lobster. I had a sneaking suspicion that having her pacifier (or as she calls it, her “two-tattie”) at night was exascerbating the situation, so I took matters into my own hands and went and cut off the entire end of the damned thing and casually left it in her bed like nothing ever happened.

When she went up to bed she was not impressed, to say the least. Her two-tattie was broken, and she wanted someone’s head for it. I asked if she wanted it and she thrust it away, haughtily as a nouveau riche Frenchman who’s been offered wine from a box. So we read a story and said prayers and kissed goodnight and I went downstairs and waited for the other shoe to drop.

Which it did, with a thud. On the monitor I heard statements like “I want another two-tattie”. “This is no good”, “This one is broken”, and “Please, I can’t go to sleep”, gradually increasing in intensity until I felt her pain in every fiber of my mommy-like being.

I went upstairs to her and told her I was very sorry that her two-tattie was broken and that they were out of them at the store; did she think it would help if I sat on her bed with her and read my book and watched her while she fell asleep? She agreed that she thought it would help, and so I settled in with Bridget Jones’s Diary (excellent book, that) and laid there reading while she occasionally snaked out a hand to pat my arm or touch my hair, reassuring herself that I was still with her, until she fell deeply asleep.