The dream of sleep

A full eight hours of sleep has become rather mythological around here. Something like the golden age of Greece, with stories of how it used to be in that long ago time. The Greeks had their minotaurs and sun chariots, we had sleeping until 10:00 on Saturdays and ear-plug free ears. It is all lost in the hazy, distant past.

I don't know when I last had eight hours of uninterrupted sleep - or even eight hours of interrupted sleep - but it wasn't recently, and the people around me are starting to suffer because of it.

There was a brief stretch of time - about four nights in a row until I ruined it by saying out loud how great it was - when younger son slept much of the night. However, older son makes up for it by waking up each morning at 5:00-5:30 and insisting that it is time to go downstairs. Attempts to use logic - "It is still dark, everyone else is asleep, therefore it is still night and you don't get cornflakes now" - were worthless, as were threats, bribes, begging, and tears (mine). When J is awake, he's awake and that isn't going to change. And no, he doesn't want to watch cartoons downstairs by himself, or play with blocks, or get a yogurt or anything else that lets us sleep. He will stand by the bed and stare at me in a really loud way (until I had J, I didn't know staring could be loud) and if I manage to persist in my stubbornness after that, the poking and pleading starts until his dad drags out of bed and down the stairs where they are really loud and perky directly under our room, so I am awake anyway.

Not that I'm bitter.

When J is asleep, he sleeps very soundly! Which is a good thing, because he insists on sleeping in the hall outside our room and we make a lot of trips past his little sleep cocoon - he's always been a floor sleeper, but the hall is new since bringing home D. A couple of times we've almost stepped on him, but now we're used to keeping strictly away from the closet side of the hall as we come and go. When I come up for bed I find him contorted like a pretzel, twisted around a pile of things he accumulated from various rooms as he was settling in after his stories and good-night kisses: extra pillows and books and bears and motorcycles. For a while he was putting on a sweater of Roni's over his pjs but lately he's switched to clutching a scarf of mine or a pair of my big woolen socks over his footie pajamas. He just likes to have something of ours with him.

On the rare days that older son sleeps until 6:00, or the heaven that is 6:15, younger son has been up three, four, eight times during the night. He sleeps very well from 8:00 to about 10-11:00 and then usually wakes up crying about every 45 (or 15) minutes for a couple hours. On lucky nights it is enough to go in and turn him on his side, retrieve his hand towel and panda from where ever they have landed, and he'll settle back to sleep for awhile. On unlucky nights, the only thing that soothes him is if I climb in bed with him and he can sleep plastered on top of me. Which is great for his bonding and his sleep, but I can't sleep that way. He squirms and likes to have his head jammed up against my chin and I'm a side-sleeper anyway. So I doze on and off, my thoughts drifting randomly between absolute warm fuzzies that this amazing, adorable little boy is actually mine, and counting exactly how many minutes of sleep I'm losing with every fifteen minute chime of the clock downstairs.

Sometimes bringing him into bed with us helps him sleep, but then there is still the squirming and kicking and plastering, so both Roni and I aren't getting sleep, so it is better to keep it to one awake adult in his room.

Roni does his share, but D often wants nothing to do with him at night so takes longer to go back to sleep, and I can't sleep through the crying, so then we're just both awake. (Another aside: much as I love him, it just makes me crazy with jealousy that Roni can fall back asleep again in about 4.3 seconds after getting up while it takes me 15-20 minutes to get back to sleep.) Lately, a few nights I've resorted to earplugs which gives me sore ears the next day but works really well! On Saturdays, Roni will often take the boys to the pool in the morning and I crawl back in bed. (Have I mentioned what a great husband he is!)

I know this is just a stage in our lives, but I am a sleeper by nature. Nine hours is about what I need to be a happy, patient, organized person. Right now, I'm a bit . . . we'll say short tempered and weepy and leave it at that.