When Jay put Max down on the floor, he just meant to let him fuss for a moment and show him we-do-not-kick-daddy. I was too sleep deprived to understand that at 3am.
Max is doing better. A little. He is waking one to three times a night and taking a regular nap. I just need to figure out how to lengthen his naps and periods of night time sleep. Oh and I need to move that mountain while I am at it.
…so desperate that I will give up sleep for a few days to see if I can improve on things around here.
Max has been going to sleep pretty well. We have the bedtime routine down pat. Teeth, Book, Nurse, Bed. Then I sit by the Pack and Play while he goes to sleep. If he gets up or goofs off, I leave the room and he gets all mad, but when I come back after a couple minutes, he is ready to lay down and go to sleep. It usually takes very little time, and I can sit by the door and read by the light of the hallway lamp. It even works at naptime!
But staying asleep is another story. UGH!!! Once he wakes up from the first stretch of sleep, anytime between 11pm and 1am, he will nurse, kick, toss, turn, and generally make it impossible for anyone to sleep besides him. And his sleep isn’t all that restful. I am so done.
So last night he went to bed like a dream. He stayed asleep until about the time I was dozing off at 11:20pm (yes, I stayed up too late, shame on me – but Good Eats was on.) and then he woke up.
I nursed him in the rocking chair, then put him back in bed. He was not appreciative.
So I started the bedtime thing. If he was laying down, I stayed right by the bed, when he got up, I went out and let him fuss. Sometime around 12:45, I began to get really tired of this.
Thankfully Ben was sleeping in the girls’ room, so I crawled into Ben’s bed and Max fussed on and off with my trying to get him to lay down, occasionally getting up to pat his back, get his pacifier when he threw it, etc. He began to doze on and off around 1:30 (!!!!) but didn’t get fully to sleep until about 2. (Yawn.) So I crashed in Ben’s bed. Finally. Sleep.
Max woke up, sincerely unhappy that he was still in his bed at 4:44am. Oh good grief. I was so delirious with sleep deprivation by this time, I just took him into our bed and tried to lay down and get back to sleep while nursing him. Max had a quick snack and decided he would much rather wrestle, which resulted in my getting the head-butt-of-love directly to the mouth. Grrr… now I was getting grouchy. I have had precisely 164 minutes of sleep so far and now I am injured as well. Talk about adding injury to insult.
I roll Max over to Jay’s side of the bed, in hopes that, in his sleep, he has somehow known about my hellish night and can pin Max down and get him to sleep. Nope. Max kicks Jay. Jay puts Max down on the floor and rolls over to go back to sleep.
Should I let my crabby one year old wander the house unsupervised at night? Nah, didn’t think so. So I get up and start the whole bedtime thing again. Only now it is 5am and the sun is starting to come up. We may have room darkening shades, but any dummy can see around the edges. My chances are slim. Max lays down, I lay down in Ben’s bed. Can I grab a few more minutes of sleep? No. Max freaks out since he can’t see me. (Even though I am whispering calming things to him the whole time, things like, “Mommy’s right here,” “Hush, it’s okay,” and “Go to sleep or I will throw you out the window.”) So I move the pillow and blanket and lay down right next to the pack and play on the floor. Max is still freaking out unless I hold my arm in a really awkward possition to that my hand is on the mesh and he can put his hand on it.
His hand slowly droops down. Dare I hope he is asleep? I take a peek.
He is sitting up playing. Sigh. Yawn.
I guess that 164 minutes was it for me. Max is up for the day. He should be ready to take a nap around 9am, just about the time my day has plunged into full-speed-ahead mode.
I’m going to bed at 7 tonight.