I think he is trying to kill me.

I don’t know why he would want to do such a thing, since clearly my continued presence on this earth is to his benefit, but the child will not sleep.  As a matter of fact, for the past couple of weeks, he’s been waking up so very so sad at about midnight or 12:15…and then again sometime on or before 2:30, and then usually about 5.

I suppose since he is so young, he probably isn’t clued into the fact that I am a terrible sleeper and that his nocturnal nursing parties are keeeeeling me.  But really.

I’mabboutadie.

Since he and Joshua share a room, we haven’t been able to Ferber him in awhile.   Joshua bunked with Sophie for several months last year while we were trying it out, and I fear we’re going to have to put him back in her room again soon.  But the Ferbering has never seemed to stick with Jonah.  Blargh.

Well, Sophie started sleeping really well when she was about 15 months old…and Jonah is 13 months…so hopefully I’ve got at least eight weeks of fight left in me!  Until then, there’s coffee and Mountain Dew, right?

And at least he’s a cute little killer!

But seriously I’M DYING HERE.

I still can’t sleep, so that’s normal, and believe it or not, I have been consistently showering AND putting on makeup every morning before I take Sophie to school.  I have two nice pairs of jeans that fit me NOW (thank you Lands’ End Blissdom sponsorship!) and most of my pre-pregnancy tops fit.  So I am decently clothed (until summer and I pray I’ll have shed that last 10 by then.)

But I still don’t feel quite back to me in one way.  Here on this blog, I feel like I’ve lost my voice.  All I can think of to write about is a funny kid anecdote or a whine, whine, whine, post but I don’t feel like I’m…relevant.   Like it’s all just meaningless chatter.

I’m struggling.  My days are filled with happy things but they are filled with hard things, too.  I am not adjusting as well to three as I’d like.  I don’t have a minute to just sit and breathe, like, ever.  And I try to get in bed as soon as the baby settles down about 9:30 or 10, but he’s been not sleeping so well lately and usually the first 3 or 4 hours is the best sleep I get ever and it’s been getting interrupted a lot…

I have LOST my ability to multi-task. Lost it completely. Can’t do more than one thing at a time.  And sometimes that is good, but sometimes it makes me want to hurl myself off a skyscraper.  Like when all three kids want something at once.

So anyways, that’s where I am.  I just wanted to let you know.  I’m trying, trying to figure out how to be me in this new context.  I hope you’ll stick with me as I work through it.

Well, turns out my BP was indeed pretty high.  Not high enough to send me straight to the hospital, but high enough to send me right back to the doctor today instead of next Tuesday.  If it’s still high today, it’s possible I may be having the baby this weekend to avoid any bad news for me and baby if things go longer.

Or, I could be fine, and we could stick with my original c-section date of December 26th.  Which was actually my 2nd date, the first was December 23rd, but then my doctor had to go out of town so it was moved to the 26th.  Which I was majorly bummed about because I actually wanted to have this baby before Christmas even if it meant being in the hospital Christmas Day (we most likely would have come home Christmas Day.)

But anyhoo.  Now I have no idea when baby Jonah will make his debut, and really, when does anyone ever?  My water could break tomorrow and it could be go time regardless!  (Not that I have ever actually, you know, gone into labor or had my water break.  But I don’t put anything past little babies.)

I don’t have a lot of faith in ye olde blood pressure settling down, to be honest.  And, I would really like to have him when my wonderful doctor can deliver him as opposed to when she is out of town next week!  So we’ll see…at least mine and baby’s things are half-packed now…my pajamas have been found and washed, and Emily has sworn to commandeer a helicopter if necessary to get to this birth!

Stay tuned…

It’s 3:00 a.m. I woke up about an hour ago, thanks to some serious wind and rain, which I was sure was a tornado. According to our local tv station, though, it was only a severe thunderstorm warning. What does that even mean? I’m pretty sure that if it’s a thunderstorm, we’ll know. And it doesn’t seem very action-oriented. I mean, should we have found shelter from the… thunder?

Anyway, since then I haven’t been able to go to sleep, which is quasi-unusual for me. I am generally a pretty good sleeper. In fact, I consider it one of my primary talents. It’s failing me tonight, though.

Want to know what is keeping me up? This BLOG.

When I woke up, I had been dreaming about a giveaway for the new movie “Tangled” that I’m supposed to do. Yes, you read that right. I can’t sleep because I’m supposed to blog about movie clips and associated t-shirts and silly bandz (stayed tuned tomorrow! Or maybe the next day…) I have about 10 more reviews/giveaways that I need to get up, like, yesterday and it is stressing me out.

Over-committed much?

Unfortunately, while the thought of blog posts yet to do is keeping me awake, I don’t really have the mental fortitude to actually do any of them right now.

So instead, you get a stream-of-consciousness blog post. Yay!

I also don’t feel well. I’ve been thinking for a few days that I’m coming down with something. But I really don’t have time to be sick. And with the recent decision to start bringing Sam to the daycare near my work (which btw, this almost-illness was surely caused by the soup I ate last week that was prepared by the children at said daycare. I should have totally turned around and left immediately when I noticed that I was the ONLY PARENT THERE. Hello new daycare mom, you are a sucker!) , there is really no point in taking a sick day, because I’d either have to a) drive 40 minutes to drop him off and then drive 40 minutes home and then do it all again at 5:00 or b) keep him home with me. And we all know how restful that would be. So off to work I will go.

Anyway.

The weather has calmed down now, and the sounds from outside have gone from alarming to relaxing. Perhaps I will be able to sleep now. You know, if my husband isn’t snoring and I can actually hear the rain on the roof.

Before I sign off this completely pointless post, I would like to point out one thing. When I awoke earlier, in the midst of dreaming about my to-do list, and heard the storm going on outside – despite my I-just-woke-up disorientation – I was immediately so thankful for having a warm, dry, safe home for my children.

Isn’t that just about all we can ask?

And on that note, I’m going to sleep.

Until this past week.  All of a suddenly she is screaming and crying at night, and when Bobby or I go to talk to her, she tries to get out of her bedroom door and run to ours.  This is all new and befuddling to us.  I mean, 4 or 5 months since we finally got Joshua to stay in his own bed, and now we’ve got to get Sophie back to sleeping soundly in hers.  (Because fer realzies, there is going to be a baby in a bassinet in our room in 3.5 months!)  For the past several days, Bobby has been taking one for the team and has been sleeping in her room much of the night, sneaking out when he can, going back when she wakes up calling for us again.  Because, with my myriad sleeping problems, I really cannot sleep at all if I’m in her bed.  And with the constant sleep interruptions, I have a lot of trouble falling back asleep – which is why I’m writing this at 4:22 a.m.

Sophie’s had a cold the past few days – coincidence or not?  She acts totally fine during the day, just has had a runny nose and cough.  Is that it?  Illness has disturbed her sleep before, but never for this long.   Or is she experiencing some sort of night time separation anxiety?  She does great when I drop her off at preschool, but maybe her nervousness about it all is coming out at night?

I have no idea.  But I am exhausted, and my husband is half-dead (and has Sophie’s cold) after a week of this.  So, any advice?  What should we do to get Sophie’s bedtimes and nights back on track?  I could use some advice!!

Speaking of advice, I’m Co-hosting a chat with some other great bloggers on The Motherhood.com today at noon EST. The Topic is “Best Advice for New Moms” – I’d love it if you’d join us!  (I hope to get some good advice myself.  I feel like a new mom all over again with this baby since Sophie will be FOUR when he is born!) All you have to do is log in to the Motherhood.com and then go here.  It’s just a text chat, simply refresh the page to see the latest conversation.

But before that, please help a sister out – back to my Sophie sleeping problem – what should I do?

And I’m only halfway there!  How am I gonna make it through the rest of this pregnancy?  I got very little rest on vacation, thanks to the kids sleeping in the same room with us (Sophie at 3 a.m.: “What? Mommy, Daddy, and Joshua are ALL HERE?  Let’s PARTY!  Let’s jump on some air mattresses or poop our pants or something!) and a schedule of family fun.  And now I seriously feel like I got hit by a TRUCK.  Tonight a friend of mine stopped by about 8:15 and said, “Wow, you look like you are feeling really bad.”

I had a look in the mirror. I couldn’t argue.

All you lovely ladies who just loooove being pregnant, who feel so GREAT during the 2nd trimester, I don’t get you.  Oh how I wish I did.

Twenty more weeks.  Crossing my fingers for nineteen.  And maybe a little rest between now and then.

I like to sing “Waking Up is Hard to Do” to the tune of the oldie “Breaking Up is Hard to Do”.

Because dang.  I am terrible at sleeping and terrible at waking up!

My first thought upon waking used to be “When can I go back to sleep?”  Now it’s more like, “NOOO!!!!!!!! I’m ASLEEP FOR ONCE!  PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME WAKE UP!”  And yes, I do think that one IN CAPS.

I’ve been up now for an hour and my eyes are still heavy.  I had nightmares this morning that I was actually glad to wake up from, but they left  me so, so sleepy.  And slightly traumatized.

So, I’m off to the coffee pot.  And maybe to do some jumping  jacks.  Just kidding, that would be exercise.

But seriously.  What do YOU do to help yourself wake up?  I need some new tricks!

_______

Photo by fofurasfelinas on flickr

After chatting with my cousin Donovan, who was also awake at in the middle of the night, on Facebook for a few minutes at about 2:30-2:45,  I clicked over to TweetDeck and lo and behold, saw this tweet from my dear cousin Emily.

So apparently, if you are a first cousin of mine, you may have had trouble sleeping last night!  Emily must have wandered back to her bed, though, cause I got nuttin’ in response to the tweet I sent her:

{crickets}

About 3:30, Sophie started fussing.  I SWEAR to you that girl has “mommy is awake” radar.  So I soothed her and then got back into bed myself, where I had both night sweats and nightmares for a couple hours, until Bobby’s alarm started going off around 5:45.  Apparently I also told him *twice* that he was snoring and to roll over…when he was awake and therefore not snoring.  So all in all, it was a night of delirium, cousinly bonding, and a sad, sad, lack of ice cream (for me).

What were YOU doing in the middle of the night last night?  Wait.  Don’t answer that!

My eyes are heavy, but the truth is, the sad truth, I can’t even fall asleep without medication anymore. Can’t even take a nap. If I were to go back to bed now, it would just result in frustration. And since I need to parent and all, I probably shouldn’t take an Ambien and hit the sheets at 9 a.m.

I am tired and I am tired of being messed up in this way. I’m so frustrated.

Now, off to the coffee pot.

It’s about not finishing college.

I graduated from college a semester early. I tested out of nine credits, and took six in summer school, and – voila! – early graduation. This was especially exciting to me because Bobby and I were engaged and I really wanted to get married. But I wasn’t going to get married until I got my degree. So, graduating early allowed us to get married a few months earlier. It also saved my parents a bunch of money, and allowed me to take out less student loans. Yippeee!

And of course, opened the door for my subconscious to forever torture me with dreams about not finishing college.

In some of the dreams, I can’t find a particular class. It’s the day of the final and I realize I haven’t been to class all semester. I dash all over campus trying to find a textbook. I spend the dream searching, searching, running, never finding.

In some of them, I can’t find my school mail box at the campus post office, or CPO (read: see-po) as we called it. And of course, in said mailbox is critical info I need to graduate.

This dream I had last night was even weirder and more elaborate. It involved going to church at said college…and church was held in a swimming pool. And apparently it was taking me a real long time to graduate, because I already had Joshua, and somehow he was attending preschool at said college. And, I couldn’t find either one of our mailboxes at the CPO! Then, I got trapped in a class taught by Casey of Moosh in Indy (who was nowhere near my college, I am pretty sure she was still in high school then, the young whippersnapper) which involved her handing out a lot of Shabby Apple dresses to everyone but me, I got a mismatched top and skirt, and the class went over and I was late to pick Joshua up from his college-preschool and I had to leave Casey’s class early which prevented me from…you guessed it…graduating. (Dangit Casey! Cut a girl a BREAK!)

So.

(Quick congrats to Casey Mullins for making my my recurring nightmare!)

I didn’t sleep very well and woke up emotionally distressed. I hate it how dreams feel so real. My emotions were wrenched, my blood pressure high.

Maybe I should dig my diploma out of whatever box it’s buried in and sleep with it under my pillow?