Silent Night

I wish this post was about how Roscoe miraculously slept through the night. Instead, it is about how he did just the opposite.

Running on 2 or 3 hours of sleep Wednesday morning, I canceled the Nanny, demanded that Andy stay home to help me, and then turned to begin a full days work. I felt like I had hit bottom.

As things go in parenting, "it's not a problem, unless you think it's a problem."
Your kid will sleep only if he's nursed to dreamland? You love the quality time? Thumbs Up!! Your kid demands to be held at all times? You're more than happy to drop everything and tote the little one? Lucky babe! Your kid wakes every hour during the night? Your eyes are burning, your patience is whittled, and you can no longer function as a human being? Understood.

A good piece of advice (parenting or otherwise): if you don't like it, change it.
So we implemented change, and I'm happy to report that progress is being made. But the effort is all-consuming. In fact, I literally have not left the house since last Thursday. SIX DAYS AGO. We did have a snowstorm over the weekend, which accounts for 2.5 days of shut-in, but the rest are a result of an attempt to determine what Roscoe's sleep needs truly are, when distractions like traveling or outings are absent.

For the time being, Roscoe sleeps in the swing in his room for naps and night sleep. I have a philosophy about bed sharing, and I feel that it's being compromised. If all was going well, my preference would be for Roscoe to sleep with us. I also have a philosophy about crying, and I feel that it, too, is being compromised. I'm not talking cry-it-out here, I'm just saying that in an effort to differentiate his needs, he is sometimes left to cry longer than I would like.

The emotional aspect of this whole fiasco is way more than I could have guessed. There's nothing like knowing what your child needs and not being able to provide it or, in this case, coax it into fruition on a reasonable timetable. We're dealing with sleep here, which cannot come fast enough. And the reality is that while Andy is a willing and engaged Poppa, Roscoe's sleeping and eating needs disproportionately demand more of Momma. The demands are persistent, around the clock, and I just can't catch a break. Showering? Gyming? Brushing my teeth? Not happening. Well, maybe every other day, and it's the very last thing I find time to do before my head hits the pillow.

I've been reduced to a ball of stress, anger, exhaustion, and self pity. It's difficult to share our sleep troubles with parenting "values" on one hand, and a long list of complaints on the other. Without sounding like a martyr, I know that I made this bed (no pun intended) with my parenting choices. And hopefully, when Roscoe learns how to sleep better we will be able to go back to what once worked.

When Andy looks me in the eye and says, "I want to make it through parenting without getting a divorce." I know why I married him. And I also get that I'm stretching myself so thin that I'm ready to break.

After the night of no sleep, discouraged doesn't quite describe the way we were feeling.

we suck.
Now that sounds about right.

Parenting FAIL.
Also applicable.

I was this close to grabbing Roscoe and tucking him back into bed with us.

But then we decided to be rational. We chose to communicate and we decided to make a list--lists always make things better, right?! We broke down the ways that Roscoe used to fall asleep, the duration of his naps, the number of hours he slept, and compared them to where he is now a little less than 2 weeks later and we couldn't help but pat ourselves on the back because actually, there is improvement in every area except between the hours of 11pm and 7am (the hours during which Andy and I are trying to sleep, of course).

Yes, in a lot of ways we feel worse than we did before we started this experiment. But we should have known that things would get worse before they got better. We'll have a more scientific analysis of Roscoe's sleep, and more quantifiable results after the Christmas festivities have ended. In the meantime, we will continue with our crusade and apologize to our family and friends--who haven't seen or heard from us in weeks.