Someday, I’ll Toture Them With Sleep Deprivation
Posted By jayna on December 29, 2009
My children hate me.
Or, one hates me and the other loves me so much that she never wants to be parted from my warm and slightly boney chest. Instead of dreaming peacefully about puppies and kittens and and endless supply of warm milk while swaddled amongst cozy blankets in her crib, she prefers to spend her nights sprawled across the top of my bed, with her head furiously being bashed against my shoulder and collarbone in a desperate attempt at making them softer. In the end, she settles for my stomach. Because goodness knows that is most definitely soft.
I haven’t gone to sleep before the wee hours of the next morning for weeks.
It. Is. Breaking. Me.
Seriously. Any soul I had floating around my cold and calloused heart has been crushed beyond recognition. I have no focus. I have no patience. And I have no clean laundry.
Let’s back up a bit for the unabridged version, shall we?
Hi. My name is Jayna. I have a two year old that likes to pretend she is deaf, hates to be told to go to bed and loves to wake me up in the middle of the night. I also have an eight month old that has actually never slept an entire night in her crib, refuses to give up for the night before 11pm and has only recently started to sleep for longer than an hour at a time. In addition to that, I have a wonderful husband that lets me catch up on as much sleep as possible during daylight hours, but he has moved to a new location and we’ll be apart for who knows how long. (Though he’s here for a week . . . and that is the only reason I’m staying awake long enough to write. Yes, I do love the man holding the crying baby downstairs.)
I’m not even going to focus on the toddler whom I found wearing princess shoes, a tiara, sunglasses and a lei while sitting on her floor reading an encyclopedia at 10pm tonight. I can easily solve that problem with taking out some light bulbs and a roll of duct tape. She is the easy opponent.
The other one? Not so much on the easy.
MJ. My night owl. After months and months of torturing me with round the clock waking, she slept for a six hour stretch. One time. And then she decided that the only way she was going to sleep was after 11pm, and snuggled up with me. God help the poor soul that dares to put her anywhere near her crib. And, God help the poor soul that tries to wake her before mid-morning.
Seriously. My kid is living the life of a college student. Hits the tap late at night and then barely drags herself out of bed before afternoon hits.
Now, if I happened to not be attempting to parent a two year old at the same time, this schedule would be awesome. My kind of deal. I LOVE sleeping till noon. What I don’t love, however, is hearing a tiny voice whisper that they are hungry and want me to get up when I have only just gone to sleep hours before. Every productive thing that should be done between a toddler bedtime and a grown-up bedtime simply does not get done. Emails sit unanswered for weeks. Laundry and dishes pile up for days. Movies haven’t been watched in weeks. And the husband . . . my poor husband. Our evenings are spent in silence, rocking away in the glider, in desperate hope that will be the night she gives in. We sleep on the farthest opposite sides of the bed with our own little wedge of birth control sprawled in between.
Many things are suffering.
For months, we’ve been making excuses, thinking something will make it all better. She’ll grow out of it. We’ll move and she’ll have her own room. The weather will change and she won’t be too hot or cold at night. Anything. But, I know she isn’t going to get drowsy one night and magically decide that her crib is the place to be. And I know that us just tossing her in there and letting her cry herself to sleep, confused and abandoned, isn’t possible for me. And so, I settle in for one more night. I touch my lips to her sweet smelling baby hair and feel her chubby little fingers wrap around my necklace and we drift off to sleep.
Someday will come. Someday we’ll teach her to be okay on her own. But someday obviously isn’t here yet.
I've been living that exact thing for nearly four years, except that your two kids someone manage to morph into one. Alexis does not sleep. Ever. She can stay up until 1 in the morning and then be all sorts of chipper at 6am as she begs for her waffles. It's cruel.
We'll sleep when they go to college, right? RIGHT?
I feel for you. After Juliet was born, Tyler went through this phase. One night scotty had duty. I loaded both kids in the car,drove around for a bit until they fell asleep. Left the car running parked on my driveway and fell asleep. I have also put juliet in her baby carrier and did a sleepover in front of the drier. She was on top of the drier and Tyler and I slept on the floor in front of the drier.
One wonderful trick that helped me a ton was sleeping in the living room. We settled everyone to watch a kids movie and by the time the movie was halfway, everyone was asleep. We slept many night in the living room.
Hang in there and get creative. After you find a way to get more sleep, you will deal with the rest.
Many prayers this pass quickly even thouhg it seems like an eternity I promise it will end one day.
I can totally relate to what you're going through. I can count on one hand the number of nights that Allie has slept the entire night in her crib since she was born and she's 19 months now. I get beat all through the night while she's comfy and stretched out in the middle of our bed. Then when I get up in the morning I see that my husband is stretched out with all the room in the world along with her and I somehow ended up with about a foot.
Hope you can get a night of sleep soon but more than that maybe you can get more than one nights sleep :) I try to remind myself that they won't be this little long and when they grow up I'll give anything go back. Hard to think about that when we're exhausted and feel as though we've been beaten though.