sleep | Minivans Are Hot

May 6, 2013 by Kelli

I distinctly remember leaving the hospital with Sloan and as the nurse wheeled me out, she patted me gently on the shoulder and said, “Good luck, honey and enjoy it. Motherhood is a thrill, but exhausting. You won’t sleep well again for the next 20 years.”

She then packed me into the car and waved with a bright smile as Lee and I pulled out of the parking lot, our eyes saucer-wide. I looked back at the sleeping baby in the back seat and thought, “Whatever. All those books I read said he should be on a sleep schedule within 8 weeks. Two months and we’ll be sleeping all night again.”

No, it’s fine. You can laugh. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

I have been at this motherhood thing for almost a decade now and I can say with certainty I haven’t gone a single month in the last 118 months where I have been permitted to sleep well every night. People…I am exhausted. E-X-HAUSTED!

I mean, it’s awesome. Don’t get me wrong. If we’re being honest, you should know that I was never a great sleeper to begin with. There are stories that my parents like to tell of me not sleeping at all when I was a baby. Oddly enough, they tell these stories with a tiny bit of glee whenever I mention the kids keeping me up all night….

Between bed wetting, nightmares, random fevers, falling out of bed, the dog barking at phantom shadows, the power tripping which sets off the alarm (C’MON!!!!) and down the list it goes, I am exhausted. Right now, I don’t want a month of uninterrupted sleep – I just want one week. Just a week!

Heck – I’d settle for a Saturday morning where I got to sleep until 8:00.

Or…you know what? I’ll just take another cup of coffee. It’s the best I can do for, well at least for the next 15 years, right?

While I sip my Cup ‘O Joe, you can enjoy these pictures. They make the sleepless nights ~~totally~~ mostly worth it. (You’ll notice Landon is missing from all these shots. He is the one with the fever who woke me up at 4:30. Tia is the one who fell out of bed. I’m going to need two more cups of coffee.)

*wink*

Baggage

October 26, 2010 by Kelli

I’m carrying a little extra baggage today. It has settled in a most unattractive place. It’s not flattering. I don’t like it.

It’s under my eyes.

I haven’t been sleeping well lately. It is likely due to the fact that I have so much going on it is hard for my brain to unwind and calm down at night. Combine that with an almost three year old who has developed wonky sleeping habits and you have…baggage.

Landon is a crafty little bugger. I go back and forth as to whether I should put him in a big kid bed or keep him in the crib. I’m not sure I’m ready for the battles of a big kid bed, but him laying in bed and whining “Mommy” over and over throughout the night (and starting most mornings around 5:45), is killing me softly. Purple under my eyes is not my color.

Dangit.

This is what I hear many mornings and, recently, in the middle of the night as well:

“Moooommmyyy…I’n firsty.” “Moooommmyyy…I needa go potty.” “Moooommmmy? Tan you tome hewe pwease?”

I don’t know what it is with our boys but both of them have been difficult sleepers in their toddler years. I’ll have to share sometime the nightmare we went through with Sloan when he was 3. Just thinking about those months makes me shudder. I’m praying we don’t have to endure that kind of difficulty with Landon too, but his recent nighttime behavior is scaring me a little. The biggest problem of all is that he is so dang cute! And he knows it and is workin’ it. And me? I’m just really, really tired. There is no rest for the weary.

Take last night, for instance. I had a rehearsal at church for our upcoming Christmas Musical. It was a pretty intense scene we were working on with lots of movement and singing so it took me a bit of time to unwind when I got home. At midnight Landon started crying. Thankfully he fell back asleep after only a few minutes. At 12:49 Sloan came into our room with an issue that needed to be dealt with. Fifteen minutes later I crawled back in bed determined to fall asleep. I did, thankfully, only to be awakened at 4:00 by a massive wind storm that shook our walls so violently I found myself wondering if I should move everyone to the basement. And at 4:30 the smoke alarm in the basement started chirping every 30 seconds indicating a dying battery. At 5:27 Landon started calling for me and intermittently singing Jesus Loves Me. By 6:30 he was done being patient and his cries escalated to the point that I knew I needed to drag my weary body out of bed.

And today we start all over. There isn’t time to rest, no time to sleep and it will be another late night.

Please…someone tell me I’ll sleep again someday. Please? Puh-leeeeeze?