Oh, guys. This sleep thing. It's so rough right now. I've mentioned it before, and I'll belabor the point -- I'm not sleeping, but I am losing my mind.
Like clockwork, Leif wakes up every two hours at night (except when he wakes up every hour!). Which means that after waking up myself, feeding him, going to the bathroom, and getting back to bed, I sleep about 1.75 hours at a time until early morning (4ish), at which point Leif usually wakes every hour until August gets up and demands my presence in the kitchen at 6. It doesn't matter what time I go to bed or what time I turn of screens - I just can't get enough sleep. I can't even complete a single sleep cycle!
And I'm feeling it. I'm moody and exhausted, yes, but more insidiously, I just can't quite get things right. I forget times and dates. I miss (obvious) details. I can't remember the word I was looking for - and sometimes the word is as obvious as "knife" and I have to say something like, "the long thing you use at dinner on your plate" (that really happened). Simply put, I cannot be trusted with anything, much less anything important. And blogging feels almost entirely out of the question.
We don't know why Leif is waking so much - whether he's genuinely hungry that often, or doesn't know how to connect his sleep cycles, or he's cold, or his teeth hurt, or he'd prefer the sound of rain falling on a tin roof to the "summer rain" white noise we play for him - or if it's all of these things. Maybe he's just out to sabotage my sanity.
The irony is that we've put way more effort into teaching him how to sleep on his own than we ever did with August, and it turns out August was a better sleeper. Leif can put himself to sleep for some naps and he used to do it regularly for bedtime at night. I've been working on helping him learn how to get himself all the way to sleep rather than always nursing him to sleep, as we did with August, or rocking, walking, bouncing, or holding him until he's asleep. Sometimes he's fine on his own, sometimes he needs the tiniest bit of help (by which I mean I lie down next to him and he takes my face into his hands with the grip of death, lets out a contented sigh, and falls asleep), and sometimes it's a more involved process. But there's no doubt that he's actually getting good at getting himself to sleep with minimal parental involvement.
After our travels to the US, we're going to take strategic action. We don't know quite what the strategy will be, but we've got to do something.
So, here's your puddle jumper:
The spectators:
The poser:
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