Oh, Sleep...

I love sleep. Love it. Before the kid was born, I would get 9-10 hours a night. We lived 2.4 miles from my work, and I would sleep til 7:15, or even 7:30 and still make it in by 8. On the weekends, I would sleep in til 11, 12, heck, I'd sleep til hubby came in and told me to get up. Sometimes on the weekends, I'd get 12 or 13 hours of sleep a night. It was wonderful.

Hubby, on the other hand, has always been an early bird, up as soon as the sun, sometimes even earlier. He'd have half a day in before I ever rolled out of bed. And then he'd be in bed an hour or more before I even thought about it. We used to joke all the time about how awful it was going to be for me when our baby finally arrived and I would no longer get my required 9 hours. But hubby, of course, would be fine, because he was already flourishing on 6-7 hours/night. Someone even suggested that I shouldn't nurse our children, because obviously that would even further cut down on my sleep, which I surely couldn't handle.

So, imagine our surprise when the kid arrived and hubby became a grouchy man, while I only yawned more and exercised less because of my tiredness; my mood was hardly affected. But then, as tends to happen, as the kid got older and we all got more sleep, amnesia about how the lack of sleep affected us set in (though my exercising never returned - go figure). Until, that is, baby E arrived, along with a yawning momma and a very cranky poppa. Something had to be done.

What we had been doing was hubby would get up when baby E woke up, change him, and get him ready for me to nurse. He would go back to sleep after that, while I was nursing, though I would wake him back up after a little while if baby E wouldn't go to sleep. However, what ended up happening was that the kid was getting the cranky end of the poppa stick. And then me getting cranky, because the poor kid was getting a raw deal. And then hubby getting crankier because I was being cranky with him. Yeah, like I said, something had to be done.

So, I started just getting baby E back to sleep on my own, which has resulted in me getting even less sleep though hubby getting more and thankfully being generally less crabby. Now, my getting less sleep is not that big of a deal right now, but I am scared about what will happen when I return to work in a couple of weeks - how am I, when I can no longer nap, going to function on what ends up being about 4-5 hours a sleep/night (and no, it's not 4-5 hours in a row - that would probably be okay)?? How am I going to be able to sit with people and hear horrible things that have happened to them without either falling apart myself, or just continually yawning... Oh, y'all, I'm afraid it's not going to go well. (Side Note - baby E just started making the most pitiful noises in his sleep. He doesn't want me to go back to work either!)

So, now that I totally understand why my mom was always in bed at 10pm (since that's now late for us!), I need to figure out some way to get enough sleep to be able to function. If you have any suggestions, I'm open to them...

Today's lesson - pacifiers are a little bit awesome. There. I said it.