To Sleep, Perchance to Actually Sleep Through the Night
I'm tired. I haven't slept through the night but a handful of times for the last nine years. Yes, you read that right, nine YEARS. And I'm tired. Very, very tired. It affects everything that happens in my life.
You'd think it wouldn't be this way. After all, my kids are 9, 7, 4, and 2, certainly old enough to sleep through the night. You'd think. But the oldest can't sleep, because her tummy hurts (every day, for some reason). The seven year old cries out in his sleep, yelling about something completely unintelligible. The four year old had a nightmare and needs some snuggle time. And then there's the two year old. Still nursing. Still getting up at night. And he's learned an awesome new trick.
But first I need to back up a bit.
We live in a three bedroom townhouse, and while my house is fairly large in its living space, the smaller bedrooms are teeny. My two girls are in the larger of the two rooms, with my eldest in my old Ethan Allen canopy bed from childhood and my younger daughter in a toddler bed. This needs to change relatively soon, as Sunny has just about outgrown that toddler bed, but there isn't room for another twin in the room. We are considering putting the big bed in storage and bunking until we move from this house, something that has been planned for at least two years, but as yet hasn't happened. The other room, currently holding my older son, is only about a foot wider than my walk-in closet. The closet in the room is only six inches deep for most of it, leaving only about 18 inches of actually useful closet space. My son has a twin-sized captain's bed with drawers underneath, and the opposite wall holds a dresser with a hutch on top, and that's the only furniture in the room. There's about 2.5 feet between the edge of the bed and the dresser -- you can't open the drawers under the bed and the drawers in the dresser at the same time. It's filled to the brim with my son and his eleventy million legos and playmobile things and bionicles and hot wheels cars. There is no room for anything else.
So where's the two year old? Why, in the crib at the foot of my bed, of course. We had gotten him to sleep in the crib for a while, with my husband putting him to bed with the Gameboy of all things, but something happened, I don't know what -- maybe a solar flare or something, and now my boy won't go to sleep in the crib. We've been putting him to sleep in our bed and transferring him to the crib once he's asleep. It was working.
Then last week, he learned his new trick. He climbs out of the crib. So we're back to him waking up, deciding he doesn't want to go back to sleep without nummies, vaulting over the edge of the crib onto my bed, crawling between my husband and me and waking us both up, grabbing my face and yelling "Mom! Nummies! Now!" until I give in just to get him to hush and go back to sleep.
And I'm tired. So tired. I'm cranky and short with the kids, I'm falling behind on the never ending housework and laundry because I just don't have the energy to face it. I haven't been exercising. I've fallen behind in my blogging obligations, much less having the time to actually read and comment on the blogs I follow -- and too many posts bungling about in my brain end up lost to the ether. I can't remember anything for five minutes. My husband gets up with the kids on weekends sometimes and lets me sleep in, and my oldest is just wonderful about watching the little kids so that we can sleep late sometimes, even if it does mean they watch too much TV. But I don't want to have to rely on that to be able to function -- it puts too much responsibility on too young a kid. And she's kinda flighty sometimes.
We need to find a workable solution, because we've decided that in this economy, the earliest we will be able to move is the spring. Despite my safety misgivings (the windows in both kids' rooms are within 18" of the floor, and I have visions of the 7 year old trying to fly off the top bunk and going right out the second-story window), we spent the weekend shopping for bunk beds. I'm hopeful that if we get the two year old out of our room, that will be the challenge he needs to keep him in his bed when he wakes up at night. Our local kids' furniture store quoted us 10-14 WEEKS to get bunk beds in. I don't know if we will make it. I might just zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz *drool*. Ack, *cough* sorry, where was I? Help!
Original DC Metro Moms Blog post. When she's awake, Mary/FishyGirl blogs at The Fish Pond.