who needs sleep? no, you're never gonna get it...

I know I keep complaining about sleep loss and teething, but those two elements are stealing my sanity! Last night Tate kept waking up until finally around 2:20am Randy & I decided we would just have to let him cry. For any parent that's ever done this, you know how traumatic it is; not just for the child, but maybe mostly for the parents. I just kept checking my watch to see how long he'd been screaming/crying and finally decided I couldn't endure it any longer when it had been 20 minutes. Maybe 20 minutes doesn't sound too bad, but it seemed like an eternity to me. Tate was screaming and crying so long that I was afraid he was going to throw up from it, not to mention that he had thrown his binky out of his crib and onto the floor - a game he plays to get us to come in to get him - about 2 minutes into the cry-fest. (All our ears are super-sensitive to what the binky sounds like, whether we hear him drop it or are searching to find it somewhere.)

So, I decided to take in a bottle of warm milk and find his binky as a sort of peace offering/last attempt at helping him wind down, around 2:50am. I felt sooooo awful! He had been crying so hard that he was shaking and could barely hold his bottle steady enough to drink from it. But, the good news is that after he drank the bottle and popped his binky back in, he started to calm down and I only had to go back in around 3:10am to help him go back to sleep.

I bet heaven is like an E.R. during the night shift: it's their busiest hours. I know on nights like we've had, I've been overloading heaven with prayers for help. Last night the thought/inspiration came that I'm never "off-duty" from teaching my children. Last night's class was, "Learning to self-soothe so you can sleep in your crib, even when you feel crappy 101."

And of course after I got to sleep around 3:30am, Tate woke up again around 7:45am because he'd soaked through his diaper and was in wet pajamas & was, of course, freezing, which was a perfect prelude to then putting him back to sleep in our bed with Randy so I could feed Claire.

Now, it's 9:35am and everybody is asleep but me. Life would be easier if I didn't need sleep. I have a few quiet minutes all to myself and going back to bed doesn't sound as appealing as blogging my adventures to you. Dumb, dumb, dumb... I know. But, blogging is really therapeutic for me. Now that I've vented a bit, I can better go back to facing everything with a sense of humor, rather than discouragement. So... thanks for reading.