Weasel Of Doom

Ugh. I love my kids, but sometimes I wonder if the feeling is reciprocated…

Exhibit 1: Squeeker. Who discovered that he does not HAVE to sleep all the time. It took his brother about a month to come to the same conclusion. I was so hoping this one would follow suit, but nooooo. So, after his 8:15 feeding, the kid would not go down. I fed him again at 10 (desperate times call for desperate measures, etc), tried more feeding around 11, snatched an hour or so of sleep downstairs on the couch with him (to allow BelovedSpouse to sleep), fed him at 1:30, and then –

Exhibit 2: DemonChild. Who has not liked sleeping ever since he discovered he could stay awake. The kid fights sleep any chance he gets. And I mean fights it, to the point of pulling on his eyelashes and pinching himself. It takes him half an hour to go down for the night, most of it spent climbing in and out of his toddler bed, squirming around his toddler bed, attempting to sit on my head if I am stupid enough to put it down on his toddler bed, until he finally clonks out in exhaustion. By which point I have gone through a number of rousing renditions of “Tired Toys Are Sleeping” and “Sleep My Joy Sleep” and those famous Russian lullabies, “Chained Together,” “I Tried to Go Away From Love,” “A Star Named Sun,” “Pack of Cigarettes,” and other classics brought to you by Nautilus Pompilius and Kino. Not to mention that I cannot carry a tune to save my life, so it might very well be that he falls asleep to escape my singing… At any rate, he was down by 10 pm, just in time for me to go and give Squeek some quality boob time. Around 2 am, right after another boob time episode, DemonChild started to scream. I think he had a night terror – I could not comfort him, and after 10 minutes of screaming, he finally fell back asleep to the tune of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” with the bag count-down from 10 to 0. At which point –

Exhibit 3: Squeeker again. Crying. Would not be comforted, at least not by me. BelovedSpouse woke up, and was told it was his turn to comfort crying children. So currently Squeek is asleep, tightly swaddled, on BelovedSpouse’s chest. I keep waiting for him to wake up and ask for his friend the boob, but no luck so far (of course). It is after 5 in the morning, I have not slept yet, and last night I got only 2 hrs of sleep as well. I would scream, but that would wake the kids up.

On the plus side, I have been productive this week, despite lingering discomfort from labor (not sure if the stitches or the hemorrhoid are to blame, so they can share the responsibility). On Sunday I did a lot of laundry and vacuumed everything. On Monday the upstairs bathrooms got cleaned, and the linen closet got reogranized. On Tuesday, I have made a lot of progress cleaning the computer room. One can actually see the bed now. I also washed all the linens, and decided on the way to store them (in bins under our bed; very creative of me). BelovedSpouse took a half-day, and we went to the new Wal-Mart super-center, where I promptly spent the rest of my gift certificate from BelovedSpouse’s dad. Of course, I only bought 2 storage bins, and it turns out I can use another 6 for the bedding, proving once again that I cannot estimate worth anything. Oh well, good thing there are more at Wally Mart ;-)

P.S. Kids update, Wednesday, 1:30 pm: DemonChild was up by 7 am, and roamed around for an hour or so when BelovedChild fell asleep downstairs. Squeeker fed around 5:30 am, slept on me until his 8:30 feeding, and has been sleeping in the pack’n'play for the last 4 hours or so. Where is that sleeping behavior when it is night? ;-) At any rate, hopefully he will wake up soon, because he needs to be fed (and I need to feed him *smiles*)