Category Archives: Sleep

..or lack thereof

It was like being shipped off to Lazy Parents Camp

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This past weekend, we decided to capitalize on my day off, and take an impromptu trip down to Celene and Thad’s. Getting to escape our daily routines for a while? I’M. SO. THERE!

It took us no time at all to 86 every one of our soul-crushing routines, and become the anti-parents.

Bedtime? Whatev.
Meals? Here’s some Pirate Booty.
Educational TV? Stella, this is the E! Channel.

It was warm. There was ample shopping. There was no pressure, no phone, no drop-off/pick-up logistics, and other than keeping our children alive, no real responsibility to do anything other than breathe. And to be perfectly honest, there were times when even that was just a little too taxing. Heck, the kids even got into the spirit of things and gave us a couple of night’s of decent sleep.

If this one was any indication, it is my suggestion that all future vacations be planned no earlier than 36 hours in advance.

Although I didn’t take a single photo all weekend, Ryan (as in “Shannon and”) snapped these when we stopped through on Thursday night, and spent the better part of the evening wowing them with our hobo family activities:

Stella using their bed as a trampoline:

stella

Porter hanging out in nothing but a diaper:

Porter

We are either your dream guests, or your worst nightmare, I’m not quite sure.

The Facts

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If you are curious as to where I have been, look no further than the following two faces:

porter

stella

My little angels: dipped in a vat of adorable, sprinkled with a fine dusting of mischief, and covered with a thousand kisses of what I can only describe as emotional volatility. And as such, I could go either way with this post. And so, perhaps it will be safest to just stick to the facts.

Fact 1: Stella stopped napping a little over two weeks ago. Finito. Kaput. Nein Nap. It snuck up on me in the fashion that most things do in my role as parent of a child who, I am sure, received the child equivalent of Special Ops training. The first couple of days it was no big deal – I’d work at it for a while, then eventually let it slide, (naively) thinking that she would just catch up the next day. Then came the next day. And the next. And the next. Right around day 5 or so, I began realizing that we had moved from minor deviation, to newly entrenched routine. Just. Like. That. And so here we are, entering week 3 of my complete and utter surrender. Barring some rare planetary realignment, my only real hope at this point is going to be getting her to chill in some pre-alotted down time, the trick being that I am able to keep her contained without a padlock. (Damn fire regulations.)

Fact 2: In light of Fact 1, I ended up having to stage a protest of my own. It had to do with that tiny little 30 minute window I had managed to carve out for myself during the household naptime. Once she decided to stage her napping coup, I was all of a sudden faced with having to relinquish the one and only time, other than my shower, wherein I am guaranteed an opportunity to do something by myself, for myself. And so it was that we sat down eye to eye, and I explained that come hell or high water, I was going to exercise and she was going to play quietly, and she was NOT going to bother me unless she, the house, or Porter were on fire. And I’m not talking about little fire either – I mean the sets-the-alarm-off kind of fire. It took her about one time of interrupting me (for the highly important task of finding a puzzle piece) to learn that it was NOT the equivalent of fire.

Fact 3: Porter down-shifted from throwing up to snotty, then changed lanes to teething. Yes, everyone, he is finally getting that errant 4th bottom tooth. I even think I have glimpsed a couple of purple bulges where some of those monster-molars are in the back. Ouch. It figures that just as we seem to be rounding a corner towards some reasonable night-time sleep schedules, he is going to begin monster teething again. Whatever. Sleep is for weenies.

Fact 4: Stella has become a human juke box. Out of nowhere, her song repertoire grew from Itsy Bitsy Spider and Twinkle Twinkle to an endless array of tunes about frogs and monkeys and space and days of the week. The other night in the bathtub, she was singing me a song that invoked one of the most amazing recall moments I have ever had. As she chirped along about the 5 little monkeys swinging in the tree teasing Mr. Alligator, I (from places in my brain that I didn’t even know existed) began singing along with her – even going so far as to remember how the tempo of the song slowed down as Mr. Alligator came along as quiet as can be, and he SNATCHED that MONKEY right OUT of that TREE!

Along with the laundry list of other titles she has committed to memory, there is the days of the week song. This song has been particularly important to her because she has really begun to latch on to how each of the days has relevance to her life – with the most important ones being Friday (because it’s the one day of the week where she gets to go into Grani K’s when I pick up Porter), Saturday and Sunday (because they are not school days). Each day she asks us what day it is, and then does her best to figure out where it lies in proximity to the High Holy Day of Friday. So, you can imagine how excited I was when she stopped singing this song as Thursday-Thursday,Thursday-Thursday, Thursday-Thursday, Thurrrsdayyyyyyy.

Fact 5: Porter is almost walking. This video isn’t all that great, but it gives a pretty good visual on his drunken-like stagger, and lack of any speed or direction control. Mostly he just plows forward as quickly as possible until he runs into something. He is a boy, is he not? At least that is what I am constantly reminded of each time I open his diaper and he does a man-jewels check. Yup, still there.

Fact 6: Each day, my life inches one step closer to maximum capacity. You tell me the time of day, and I can tell you exactly where I am. 7:24 am? I’m at the intersection of E & Buhne. 12:24 pm? I’m passing the homeless guy right by the Tomo Cafe. 3:24 pm? Surveying the fridge to make sure we have all the ingredients for dinner. 8:24 pm? Deciding whether I am going to sit down at the computer to make a blog post or go to bed. And round and round it goes.

Fact 7: There is no amount of busy or hectic that could ever outweigh the fun, the silly, the cute, the lovable. It’s a fact.

Rhymes with Duke

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These last weeks have been about 7 varieties of crazy. The new year has been good, but it is foolish to think our lives were actually going to be calm. Our consecutive hours of sleep number has been improving (on a good night, we can eek out about 7 or 8). But, both children refuse to sleep past 5:30am, like EVER. Stella has also recently come to the conclusion that our cumulative household napping hours are being fulfilled by Porter, and has given me no end of grief in refusing to take her afternoon nap. We tend to live and die by our daily schedule, so when it is disrupted, the whole system begins to erode at an exponential pace. And, no matter how hard we try, some part of the system inevitably gets corrupted, leaving us to face the aftermath. Most nights we reach our fever pitch right about dinner time. Watching us try to complete our evening meal is like watching one of those old British comedies where everyone runs around at double speed bonking each other on the head with clubs. That, and throw in some crying.

Of our two children, it usually works out that one tends to run us through the emotional obstacle course,while the other works the physical angle. Stella has been going through difficult, yet completely typical, growing pains at school, and we are pulling out every trick in the book to keep her on track. Let’s just say that the sticker chart has lost it’s appeal and we are now moving onto Plan B. I’ll let you know when we figure out what that is.

Porter, on the other hand, has, in the last 48 hours, treated us to three rounds of puking and one round of explosive diarrhea. The puking part isn’t actually all that new, but the diarrhea was, well, it was just a special treat.

Although the diarrhea was a little perplexing, the puking part was less of an “Oh My God!” and more of a “Ugh! Not Again!” We have actually had intermittent spells of puking with Porter for about the last 4 months or so. At least, that is when we considered it no longer ‘spitting up’ but rather ‘throwing up’. (For those who are wondering about the exact distinction between the two, I have one word: chunks.) Although we have done our best to figure out some cause and effect, we have been stumped. He’ll sometimes go weeks without so much as a cough, but then will, all of a sudden and out of nowhere, shower us with his lunch three days in a row.

There was a day a couple of months back where even Stella became a victim to Porter’s trademark firehose of barf. As I was trying to maneuver him from the dining room to the changing table, we left a virtual river of spew from one room to the next. As Stella emerged from the bedroom after her nap, I was still trying to wrangle McGoo out of his clothes. She rounded the corner into my bedroom and immediately slipped in one of the puddles, falling awkwardly to the floor. As she tried standing up, she slipped again. I felt like we were all three trapped in an episode of I Love Lucy.

I mentioned all of this to the pediatrician at Porter’s last appointment, but my details were spotty and lacking in any meaningful insight other than, “he seems to throw up a lot.” I just can’t imagine how she couldn’t come up with a diagnosis based on my meaningful description of symptoms. Instead, we had had to go this one alone – gathering data the way the early pioneers did – with a crayon and a bar napkin. At this point, we have observed that, 1.) each time he throws up he has just had a bottle, 2.) the bottle was given to him within a couple hours after a meal, 3.) he never shows any other symptoms of illness, and 4.) he is ready to eat again pretty quickly afterwards, and never with any ill effects.

Thusly, we have ruled out food poisoning or flu. Instead, our hypothesis at this point is that Porter’s “I’m Full” sensor is on the blink. You know, that little voice that we all have in the back of our subconscious that says things like, “Please step AWAY from the cheesecake.” His seems to be there sometimes, while other times it turns into the cheering crowd at a hot dog eating contest, “One More! One More! One More!” It is always shocking to both Steve and I how much actually comes back up. We look at one another as if to say “did you secretly take him to an all-you-can-eat buffet?”

And so it shall be that we will commence with operation Rhymes with Duke.

Superpowers

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Our house has recently become littered with a growing number of make-shift barricades, perpetually closed doors and “hey!-look-over-here-instead” decoys, all implemented to distract Porter from the various and sundry ways in which he chooses to cause mayhem. Aside from the laundry room and bathroom, he has also become enamoured with the gigantic potted plant in the dining room, and all of the fun that can be had by frolicking in it’s loamy goodness. The only way I can truly relay to you his child’s sheer will and single-minded focus is to explain it as his superpower. If given the opportunity, I am sure he could bend iron with it.

Our increasingly regular showdowns are like something straight from the movies: Porter will be casually crawling along, and he’ll spy his target. Sensing the imminent danger, I will glance his direction. He and I will make direct eye contact for about 3 seconds. From there, a mad dash ensues wherein he will scurry towards his intended mark, while I hurdle toys, blankets and pools of drool. Invariably, I get there first – crushing his joy, yet again. In the old days when I’d close a door ahead of him, or relocate him to another room he’d just look at me and blink. Nowadays, however, I get a loud and official accounting of how I am the worst mother e-v-e-r.

Baby-proofing issues aside, Porter’s single-minded focus brings a whole new level of challenge to about every other task undertaken. Changing his diaper has become a full-on aerobic activity. His ability to twist and contort rivals something out of a Cirque du Soleil show. I’m never sure where exactly it is he thinks he is going, but he is damn sure going to die trying to get there. It is a fairly common practice these days for all the piles of extra diapers to end up on the floor next to the changing table, and for me to end up with my hands on my knees, panting. Put simply, it’s messy, dangerous and exhausting. I guess you could say that the literal act of changing diapers has become a metaphor for my life.

And, although I have written pages upon pages about his need to run us through the sleep gauntlet, I actually have some good news to report. Well, sort of. Upon returning from our holiday travels, Porter started officially sharing a bedroom with Stella. And when I say officially, I mean sleeping in the same room. Stella still hasn’t fully wrapped her brain around this concept, in that she still refers to it as “Porter sleeping in my room.” Whatever.

I moved the crib into her room months ago, but never got up the nerve to let him sleep in there for fear of exacerbating the sleep side-show we already had going. Although I was quick to complain that it couldn’t get much worse, I know that deep down I feared it could. And so, in there it sat, dormant, acting as nothing more than a giant stuffed animal corral. That is, until the day I walked into my bedroom to get Porter after a nap and found him standing up in his bassinet. Hmm. I’m just guessing here, but I bet if I went back and read the Co-Sleeper literature, I’m fairly sure there would have been some sentences specifically dedicated to advising against this type of activity. Probably in red. And all caps.

And so it was, that in trying to circumvent being brought up on child endangerment charges, the two of them began to sleep in the same room, gulp, at the same time. We had to dig out and dust off the monitors, of which we haven’t used even once since Porter’s birth (you know, the same ones we had glued to our side the entire of Stella’s infancy). Then we waited. Waited for the earth to fall off it’s axis and go spinning off into the universe. But, guess what? It didn’t. We didn’t all combust, or implode, or any of the other heinous things that my imagination had convinced me were sure to happen under such circumstances. Instead it just became a regular old night of sleeping and waking, but through some miracle of nature, Stella manages to sleep through it. And, it completely escapes me how, considering she is less than 10 feet from him. As I see it, there is only one logical reason: it’s her superpower.

So, Porter continues to wake at random and unscheduled intervals, but we actually have our room back. And you know what that means. Yes, we no longer have to quietly forage around in the dark for our pajamas and wonder if we have put them on backwards and inside out. Aww yeah.

Barfy, the elf.

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I am sure that my lack of posting about sleep issues has lulled you all into the impression that we are actually getting some. Oh how thou art mistaken. In fact, we went from relatively bad to that’s-it-I’m-outta-here over the last couple of weeks, bouncing firmly along rock bottom as we coasted into last weekend on nothing but caffeine fumes and short tempers. Blame it on teething, blame it on ear infections, blame it on the rain in spain falling mainly on the plain, the bottom line is that it is now month 8 and we are still unsure how someone so cute and easy-going can create such prolonged torture. All I know is that it got so bad that I didn’t even recognize the pain anymore. I no longer woke up in the morning tired and wistful, instead I was just glazed. I started to realize how bad it had gotten when I started having mystery stomach aches by lunchtime each day, then finally realized it was from consuming an excessive number of triple grande mochas from Starbucks. I know that given the situation, my subconscious was in the early stages of implementing a plan wherein I could eliminate the trouble of having to lift my arm to drink by being fitted with IV drip, thereby allowing me to conserve what few granules of energy I had left.

Then something strange happened. Two nights ago, was a night like any other: down at 8, up at 11, up at 2, up at 4:30 – which was then, up for the day. Typical. Then, there was last night: down at 8, up at 5:15. Dwuh? Nine. Straight. Hours. Did that really just happen?

But then, this is the part wherein the joy realized from such miracles is inevitably transient: By 5:45 he had barfed an entire bottle of formula all over me, my hair, the bed and the comforter.

And that, children, is the tale of the Miracle on B Street.