Interesting Days

When your sleep get’s disturbed, as it does when you have a baby, you start to live in a strange world. 20 or so weeks in, you finally give into what your husbands been telling you to do, and you starting trying to sleep when the baby is sleeping.

This makes for interesting days.

Plans get cancelled. Because let’s face it, when you have seen every side of the hour for what feels like an eternity, you don’t want to pass up the chance of a nap or at least some quiet alone time. Do you really want to be racing down the highway with a whiny baby, signing CiCi My Playmate (Everly’s favourite song) at the top of your lungs and hoping you get home before she falls asleep (or alternately, racing to meet friends or run errands, hoping she sleeps the entire time, both negating a public melt down AND increasingly the likelihood she will be tolerable later on)? No, some days you’d rather give up all your plans, bunker down and wrestle your baby for naps. Days become about timing when she will sleep and what you can accomplish. It’s a sick obsession, and one I never used to worry about. Some of these sleep issues are surely mine.

Cleaning stops. Because let’s face it, if you DO get her to sleep you certainly don’t feel like mopping the floors. At night, when she’s finally being put to bed, you don’t feel like washing the evening dishes or bleaching the toilets. You’re wearing only uncomfortable underwear (which does nothing for your mood) because all the good ones are in the laundry and you don’t have time to sort wash fold and put away. (for the record, our laundry is OUTSIDE the house, so I can’t just throw it in when Everly is on the floor playing).

You eat like a frat boy. When you get up from 3 to 5am, then sleep until 7:45am, get up until 11:30am, sleep until 2pm, go back to sleep at 445pm and wake up at 6pm, then go to bed for the night at 11:30pm, only to wake up at 1:15am and start all over? Shit get’s confusing. Also, no time for grocery shopping or food prep, and it becomes grabbing things and stuffing them in your face hole. I am lucky, we do weekly grocery delivery on Wednesdays BUT it’s predominantly produce. It’s a great idea, but I lack actual full components of a meal. I need to add things and need time to cook them. And when I don’t? Well, it get’s weird.

Let’s recap what I’ve eaten today so far, and where it’s going:

4:45am – Banana. So hungry.
8:15am – What should have been raisin toast, but I was too lazy and impatient to toast. So it was just raisin bread with margarine.
2:00pm – hummus and pita; a pickle; pita with peanut butter and banana
4:00pm – Chocolates

And here is what is coming up tonight with the girls:

6:00pm – Olives; hummus and pita
7:30pm – Fajitas (made by Miss Genina)
9:00pm – Sour candies, ketchup chips & smart food(cheesy popcorn to those of you who don’t know).

What is that? There are not enough meals in there. This is not how an adult eats? On better days I manage to have an actual lunch, but on days like today? It’s all walk by snacking, and calorie whoring. Moving on…

You don’t remember when you brushed your teeth. Seriously, if I do it at 3:00am, but then sleep again from 11:00am to 2:00pm? Is it like another morning? I never can remember when I did it, but I never feel like it was recently. It’s not so bad, because I figure good dental hygiene is the least I can try and maintain, so if in doubt, I brusha brusha brusha.

Hygiene, it suffers. It’s not because I like being disgusting, but it comes down to the previous point I made in relation to napping – I will often choose sleep over a shower. The thing about sleep is, I’m there when she wakes up to nip the freak out in the bud, and this helps. In the shower, I stress that she is crying, or rolling under the TV unit or freaking out. I rush through it, miss entire thighs while shaving and come out looking almost as crappy as I did going in (but smelling better). Besides like I said, I’m out of comfortable underwear.

And it’s not that I don’t shower, it’s just that I like to do it when the hubs is around so I don’t have to rush. And that does not always work out.

You have no idea what time it is, let alone what day it is. Seriously. The only reason I know a weekend is close is because I spend Thursdays with my best friend AND I’m looking forward to the hubs being home all weekend. AM and PM melt quickly in and out of each other. I don’t remember who told me this but they said the days are long but the months are short. And that’s how I feel.

It’s certainly a mindfuck. I LOVE my daughter, she is SO completely hilarious and she is learning more and more every day. I miss her when she’s not with me, and I am so lucky to be blessed with such a darling and happy little child. I just wish I could get a little bit more sleep so that her and I can get back to enjoying our time together. I do so love to nap with her, but I need her to learn to do it on her own.

I am trying to keep positive that this latest adventure in sleep disasters is the result of a developmental change, a tooth or something else and NOT the way she will sleep forever. She HAS done very well and slept like a champ on many occasions, so I KNOW she has it in her. I just wish I could help her exercise it better!

Here is to hoping I soon run out of sleep blog fodder!

Tagged as: Sleepless Infant