I’m not even going to joke about the gods any more. They clearly regard my ambitions to master sleep as akin to donning wings and taking aim at the sun, and every time I speak out loud about those ambitions they smite me. Pride, apparently, really does goeth before a fall, and seeing as the falls that I’m having don’t actually result in anyone losing consciousness, the divine smackdowns for prideful reporting of sleep victories are getting kind of frustrating.
That said, f*ck the gods.
The boy is sleeping in his own bed. The boy is sleeping in his own bed. THE BOY. IS SLEEPING. IN HIS OWN BED.
And I’m not even afraid of incurring the wrath of the sleep gods by saying so. Well, mostly not. I may need to sacrifice some stuffed barnyard creature as a precautionary measure, and I am certainly going to be knocking any all things wood-derived and I’m going to keep the victorious fist-pumps to a minimum until we’ve got this sleep thing conquered, but – let’s all keep our voices down here – I’m pretty sure that we can conquer it, the wrath of the gods notwithstanding.
I give up. I surrender. The battle has been fought. It has been lost.
We have tried everything, pretty much, to get Jasper to stay asleep in his own bed. Which is to say, we have tried everything within the limits of our physical and emotional endurance. We made a final push this weekend, a cry-it-out effort to hold the pass of our bedroom door and defend the peace of our bed, but to no avail. The boy found his way around our defenses and, like Leonidas at Thermopylae, we held our ground, we tried to hold our ground, but our forces were no match for his cries and his pleas and his Dadda Dadda Dadda Dadda MAMA MAMA MUM! And so we fell, and so we give up.
This is what 6am looks like at our house: saggy diapers and ukeleles and big, snot-smeared hugs.
It’s also what 8pm, 11pm, and 3am look like. Yes, he sleeps in those cowboy boots. No, not for any longer than two or three hours at a time.
Things are getting desperate around here. Like, really.
I can’t remember the last time I slept more than two or three hours at a stretch. I had hoped that my brief trip to Chicago would provide a full night’s sleep, but, alas, I spent that night waking up every hour wondering why I wasn’t being woken up every hour. Which, you know: FRUSTRATING.
The source of the problem is this: wakeful little Jasper and his grabby little hands. The boy has been in some kind of continuous developmental spurt/growth spurt/teething bender/WHATEVER since early September and the only thing that calms him down when he wakes – as he inevitably does, every night – is a fistful of my hair, preferably clutched while his little body – conveniently relocated to the master bed – is wrapped tightly around my head. Removal of legs or arms or fists results in high pitched wailing.