Slumber Interruptus

I need some sleep.  I mean, I need some good sleep.  The kind that involves drooling on my pillow for one whole, solid, blissful night.

Moms of newborns: please close your eyes.  You really shouldn't read the rest of this.  I don't want to be responsible for a bunch of women going into post-partum psychosis.

Are they gone?  Okay then.

Holy sleep deprivation, Batman.  Wasn't this supposed be done already?  People always tell you that babies sleep through the night at six weeks.  And then when that doesn't happen, they tell you, oh, it's when the babies are 9 pounds.  It has to do with how much milk they can hold in their tummies.  And then when that doesn't happen, they say it's when they get to six months.

They're. All. Lying. 

They're lying out of kindness, because they know I'm going to eat a bullet if I don't have that tiny glimmer of hope that I might get some decent sleep at some point in the near-ish future.  But they're still lying.

These tiny little people are here to ruin my sleep forevah.  I think it's actually a well-crafted plot on their part: depriving Mommy of sleep leaves her too addled to care how many cookies the kids eat or whether they've watched sixteen straight hours of Noggin.  I'm sure it will only get worse as they get older.  I'll be too tired to slowly drive behind my son while he bikes into town for the first time.  (I'm totally getting GPS chips implanted in my kids' heads at the next well check.) I'll be too tired to realize that my daughter is using her "just for emergencies" cell phone to sext the cute shop teacher. (Whatever happened to convent schools?)

We give our kids freedom and independence not out of some well-thought-out philosophy of "free range parenting," but out of desperation.  How many times did our parents look at us, hands on hips, and then shrug and say, "Fine. Go."  They were just too tired to stop us, because we had been messing with their sleep for seventeen years.  Mwah hahahahaha.

Yes, but now, of course, the joke's on me.  Here's how our "bedtime" went the other night:

7:00 bedtime snack while watching the idiot box
7:30 put on pajamas and brush teeth
7:45 story-time for the younger two; independent reading for the older two
8:00 lights-out for the younger two
8:30 lights out for the older two

Sounds great so far, doesn't it?  Like something out of that No-Cry Sleep Solution book. 

9:00 Peanut Butter Kid comes downstairs with tears wobbling on her lashes.  "I can't sleep yet," she whimpers.  I tell her that it's okay to just lie there and rest, and send her back up.

9:30 Peanut Butter Kid is now sobbing upstairs.  I tell her to come downstairs.  She scared, she's worried about something, her tummy hurts, you guys know all the lines.  At this point I really want to be done with the day.  I want to watch re-runs of West Wing and eat cookies.  I send her into our room, where the Absent-Minded Professor is reading.  He also wants his day to be done.  He wants to read Fifty Boring Facts About the Economy or whatever it is he's reading.  He lets her into our bed.

Parents: 0
Kids: 1

10:30 West Wing is over and I am all set to dream about Jimmy Smits fall asleep.  Here comes Cookie, who is worried about math.  That's right: It's the end of June, six weeks away from the start of the next school year, and she's worried about math.  Nooooo anxiety issues here.  I reassure her that I will work with her more on her summer math workbook, which we have purchased at her insistence, tomorrow.

Parents: 0
Kids: 2 
Jimmy Smits: 10

11:30 The Pork Lo Maniac comes downstairs crying.  Her tummy hurts and her head hurts.  She genuinely does like ill, but on the other hand, she's nine years old and it's 11:30 at night.  I sit on the couch with her while she drinks some water and talks about what's bothering her.  She goes back to bed.  I go back to bed.

Parents: 0
Kids: 3

At this point you may be wondering why on earth the Absent-Minded Professor isn't getting up for any of this.  It's because he has a sleep disorder which requires a CPAP machine.  Basically it's like I sleep next to a guy in an iron lung.  The thing makes so much white noise around his head that he (allegedly) doesn't hear the kids.  In all fairness, I insisted on him getting the CPAP machine, because I don't actually want him to stop breathing in the middle of the night.  Also, his snoring was really starting to piss me off.

Anyway, the Absent-Minded Professor doesn't hear the kids when they wake up.  I, on the other hand, have that radar Mommy-hearing that means I wake up if they so much as roll over.  Sometimes I'll whack the Professor in the head until the mask falls off and he wakes up.  But usually, since I'm already awake, and you know, he works all the time to take care of us, I deal with it.

2:30 in the a. freakin' m. MOOOOOOMMMMMMMMEEEEEEEEE!  Little Dude is screaming like someone is ripping off his arms.  I run upstairs.  I cannot understand what he's saying.  He's confused and tired and he has a speech delay.  Also, I may not be as coherent as I would usually be, because, again, it's 2:30.  In the morning.  What we used to call in the military, O-dark-thirty.

Eventually I determine that although this may or may not have been the original problem, the bed is wet.  Little Dude's nighttime diaper has leaked.  So in addition to being woken up in the middle of the night, I have the added bonus of two extra loads of laundry to face.  Neat.  I get Little Dude into a fresh diaper and clean jammies, and carry him downstairs to our bed.

At this point in the process, I really can't fathom any alternative.  Sure, in the light of day, with the assistance of coffee, it occurs to me that I could have re-made the bed with clean sheets for him, but I couldn't figure that one out in the moment.  Also, even if that thought had occurred to me, I probably wouldn't have done it.  Because I was too tired.

So, there we are, with the two oldest finally asleep upstairs, probably having nightmares about standardized testing.  The younger two are in our (thankfully King-sized) bed, in between us.

Parents: 0
Kids: 4, for the win.

Last-minute update: Last night, Little Dude just walked downstairs and mumbled next to my bed until I picked him up and put him in our bed.  An hour later, he got up and wandered away.  I was so comatose, the Absent-Minded Professor is the one who noticed.  We found him sitting on the couch staring into the dark.  Oh dear. I don't know if Asperger Syndrome involves sleep issues, but really? Now I have to worry about quiet wandering?  I'll never sleep again.