Another day, another disastrous night.

To my friends who are starting to hear their biological clocks tick with varying degrees of volume, please. Let me be your birth control.

Owen was 9 months old on the 15th of this month. By all accounts - his doctor, the "experts", my circle of friends, family and acquaintances, he should be LONG since sleeping through the night. And yet, I wake up bleary eyed again after another night where I got maybe 4 hours of sleep. Maybe. And not in a row.

Owen just doesn't sleep. I don't understand it and I really can't deal with it. Most nights I end up crying along with him because friends, there is a reason they torture people in guantanamo by sleep deprivation. It's hell. The long term effects of 9 months without sleeping (more, really, because anyone who's ever been 30+ weeks pregnant will tell you you're not sleeping much then eiher) have started to really affect my cognitive abilities. My long term memory is probably worse than average, but my rote and short term memories are excellent, or, they were excellent. Lately, particularly at work, my short term memory deficits are becoming problematic. I guess I could be experiencing early dementia, but my money's on sheer exhaustion. Yesterday, I checked my voicemail, listened to a message, wrote down a phone number and pressed delete. I then looked down at the pad of paper I wrote the message on, and had zero idea 1) who the message had been from 2) what the message was about 3) who's phone number that was 4) when/if and why I was supposed to call back. Immediately after listening to the message. I am tired.

I'm also just getting slow. My job hasn't gotten harder over the last 6 months - it's fast paced and there's a lot to get done every day, but I've never had trouble getting everything done before. Lately, I can barely keep my head above water. I am sure it's because I'm not sleeping. The lack of sleep hasn't improved my mood, either. I've always been sort of (to be charitable) cynical and misanthropic. Now I am veritable hurricane of negativity. I'm one step away from reminding kids at the mall waiting for Santa that they're lucky they weren't born in Somalia, and explaining precisely why.

I just don't know what to do about it. I am really trying to let him put himself back to sleep but he won't. And worse, if I let him cry for more than 10 minutes without going in, he starts literally throwing himself against the sides of his crib. Am I supposed to let him concuss himself back to sleep? Seems unlikely. Even when I bring him into bed with me, he won't sleep anymore. Sometimes feeding him helps, but most times it doesn't. There is no rhyme or reason.

I am ready to spend every last cent we have on a person to sit here from 10pm to 6am. Just so that I can sleep. It would be so worth it. do they have people like that?

The musings of the sleep deprived.

I've had a revelation this morning, as I read the news and proceeded to be really bummed by the continuing stream of "world is ending" articles.

I consider myself pretty smart. Whenever I've been a student, at any level, I've done not only well but significantly better than average. So it was a real blow to the ol' ego for me that I was really, really bad at economics when I had to take it in college. In fact, I was SO bad at economics I took two semesters of it over the summer - not to try and get credit for it, but because it macro and micro were required for my major (or actually, what was at the time my major. I switched it later so it was all ultimately for naught) and I was worried I wouldn't do well. So I actually took micro and macro over the summer at UNH so that when I took them the following year, my sophomore year, I wouldn't have to worry about doing poorly. Well, pathetically enough, despite the fact that I had already taken both courses, I had a miserable time in microeconomics the first semester. In fact, the only way I squeaked by at all was because my roommate had taken the course year before and she more or less let me study off her old exams. Some crazy memorization helped me, but I still only kept my head above water. Basically, I was SO bad at it, and disliked it so much, that I switched majors and never even took macro second semester.

And I've been fairly put out since then as to why I did so poorly, and just concluded that I'm not as smart as I thought I was.

Until now. reading the economic news these days, I've come to the conclusion that no one else understands it either! Right? If they did, we probably wouldn't be going to economic hell in a handbasket.

Sucks that we're all headed for the breadlines, of course, but at least I feel somewhat vindicated.

Are they still taking babies in Nebraska?

It is 2:29 am. Owen has been screaming since 11:30 pm. I have been going into his room every 10 minutes to rub his back and leave, just like the books advise me to. I am past the end of my rope with this. Tomorrow I will once again be a worthless lump of migraine by 2pm because I cannot function without sleeping. Sigh.

The Holiday Spirit

I'm going to admit something totally un-American: I hate Christmas. Shocking, right? Might as well just give up and let the terrorists win - but I do. Sometimes I think I'd hate it less if the Christmas season lasted a reasonable two weeks, but the mid-October to New Year's Christmasapalooza? Hate. it. This year on Halloween itself I walked into a CVS to purchase some candy corn and couldn't find it, because there was a giant cardboard box of Christmas candy draped with pine garland around it in the middle of the store. I never get into the holiday spirit, I generally annoy everyone by insisting on giving obnoxious gifts that imply my lack of christmas spirit (A copy of an inconvenient truth for the person that doesn't believe in global wamring; a donation to a charity for the most materialistic people on my list) which only serves to royally piss people off. The better plan would be to just grin and hang some tinsel, but I can't help myself. This time of year brings out my misanthropy.

Honestly in the giant pro/con list that is having a kid, the holidays were a definite CON for me. I know some people with an 8 month old would have been at a tree farm November 5th just dying to get their baby's first Christmas tree. Lots of people. But I have been dreading having to "do" christmas - fake enthusiasm for it, do the Santa thing, give my kid non-jerky gifts (nothing spells therapy like your mom giving you a flock of geese for christmas 12 years in a row). It's one thing for me to put on my people-pleasing face on Christmas day and visit the relatives; it's entirely another to have the responsibility of creating another person's Christmas memories. Kids love Christmas. Time to suck it up.

The one exception to my negativity is Christmas parties. I do like Christmas parties, mostly because I really like parties and the mere fact that a party takes place in december doesn't make it bad. Owen went to his first Christmas party last night (sadly, we were invited to two christmas parties last night, both of which I really would have liked to go to, but we had to go to the family one) and my anti-Chrismasness began to thaw a little. Every year my mom's side of the family (which is enormous) has a christmas party. They rent a VFW hall, bring lots of food, hire a magician for the kids and one of my mom's cousins dresses up as Santa. It's actually pretty....fun.

don't get any ideas. I'm still the grinchiest grinch that ever grinched the grinch...but you know what? I was excited when Santa showed up for Owen to sit on his lap. And all the kids running around yelling for santa seemed more cheerful than annoying. Even the Christmas music didn't get on my nerves the way it usually does. I left thinking that maybe this Christmas with a kid thing isn't going to be as bad as I think.

This is Owen NEAR Santa. Abandoning him on Santa's lap wasn't going to work so well (stranger anxiety is starting to kick in) but we got near to Santa so he could give him a present.



Here are my parents pretending to give Owen some beer. It was really just water, but it was funny.




Here's a nice picture of us with my parents:


Santa gave Owen a present, which he actually still hasn't opened:


An finally, because I think it's funny, this is what Owen wore yesterday. Yep, your mama dresses you funny. Sorry, kid.

On my tombstone, it will read:

"She is using eternity to catch up on sleep.
It will probably take that long."

I am so sleep deprived that I am surprised I am still alive, actually. A person in my condition probably shouldn't be operating motor vehicles, using knives, or even hairdryers, for that matter.

Before we begin discussing Owen's sleep problems, I would like to preempt the discussion that usually follows by providing the following information:

Yes, I have read Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. I've ALSO read: The No-Cry Sleep solution, Solve your Child's Sleep Problems (ha!), The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems (double ha!), Babywise, aaaaaaaand The Seven O'Clock Bedtime. Yes! All of them! And I've swaddled. I've done pick up/put down. I've let him cry. I've picked him up right when he starts to whimper to see if I could get him back to sleep before he ever really wakes up. I've tried a "dream feed". I've tried putting water in the bottle. I've tried Ferber. I've tried modified Ferber. I've tried cosleeping. I've tried putting my tshirts in the crib. I've tried making it warmer. I've tried making it cooler. I've tried having him nap less during the day. I've tried having him nap MORE during the day. I'VE TRIED IT! WHATEVER IT IS, PEOPLE, I HAVE TRIED IT!

I feel like I have tried everything under the sun, twice, and the fact remains that the three of us are still waking up no less than four times a night, and on really bad nights, 5 or 6. And I know that the conventional wisdom at this point is that I just have to let him cry it out. But I am telling you - he will cry. and cry. and cry. but he will not get to out. And I can do the two minutes of crying. the five minutes of crying. I can even do the 18 minutes of crying before going in. But I can't do hours of crying. Perhaps, if I truly left the baby to cry for several hours several nights in a row, he would eventually put himself back to sleep. I tried a hard line approach exactly once, and after about three hours I decided that it was essentially child abuse, and I'll never do it again.

But we are not sleeping. It is really, really bad. And I don't know how much longer I can keep this up. And I am frustrated that almost every friend I have that has a kid loves to tell me how they were sleeping 10 hours at a time at 6 1/2 weeks. And all the helpful suggestions - look, I know people have nothing but the best intentions, but you do not go months at a time without sleeping without "how get baby sleep through night" being your #1 google search. And at this point, through the night is way more than I'm asking for. I'll take one - heck, I'll take TWO night wakings and call it success. He's capable of it - at around 4 - 5 months Owen was waking up once a night. This night waking stuff started around six months, and has been getting progressively worse since then. I'm entirely convinced that if present trends continue, we might as well resign ourselves to never sleeping again by a year.

It's because I drank all that coffee when I was pregnant, isn't it. dang.