Tag: sleepless nights

Is Acceptance the Same as Defeat?

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C is a terrible sleeper. He wakes up in the middle of the night and STRUGGLES to get back to sleep. The struggle is really mine. He’s just hanging out, reenacting episodes of his favorite TV shows and movies…loudly. At the end of last week, though, we seemed to turn a corner to where he slept as much through the night as he ever does. Meaning we’d put him to sleep in his bed, then at some point, he’d wake up, come running into our room, and go right back to sleep.

Then he spent the weekend at my mom’s house.

Hubby and I were happy for the break, so we could sleep through the night and do some much-needed basement reorganizing. We did a lot of heavy lifting, which made the nights sleeping in the bed, just the two of us without kicking, fussy toddlers, a delight. Readers, we even got to cuddle, just the two of us. No squirmy, cute little furnaces in between us.

We picked the boys up on Monday afternoon. They had a good time, as always, at my mom’s. And to her credit, she followed their bedtime routine every night they were there. For some reason, however, C came back, and his sleep pattern was all out of whack. It wasn’t so much out of whack as it was back to what it was before. He woke up at 1 AM both nights and wouldn’t go back to sleep for hours, if at all.

Before we picked them up, I felt rested. Even just shy of reinvigorated — the only thing that would reinvigorate me at this point would be two weeks by myself on a beach and a stack of books from my TBR pile. Since that isn’t happening anytime soon, this girl will take a few days’ reprieve and a comfy reading chair for an hour or two.

But I digress. The kid wouldn’t go to sleep. He kept singing “Be Prepared” from The Lion King. While he was singing, I was googling pressure points to try and help him. Just so you know, that didn’t work either. 😭

I think I’ve finally reached the acceptance point in my grieving over lack of sleep process. I’ll never sleep again, and I’m begrudgingly ok with it — no, I’m not — but that is what motherhood is all about, right? Sacrificing all for the sake of our kids.

Just Call Me Stuck-in-a-Rut Mama!

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Originally, this post started as me venting about how stuck in a loop I’ve been feeling. How much some days I want to let the kids take control. Nothing will shake you out of a routine like a winter in New England.

C came into our room around 1 AM — not really that abnormal — and couldn’t/wouldn’t go back to sleep — also not that abnormal — until I gave him some melatonin. While he got back to sleep, I was fully awake, playing Solitaire on my phone when A’s alarm went off at 4:30.

As I lay there lamenting my lack of sleep, A came rushing back to our bedroom, letting me know it had snowed overnight — it was raining when we went to bed — and he wasn’t going to have time to shovel our “only annoying that it’s big when it snows” driveway, so I’d have to do it to clear it for the school bus! Yay.😑

Somewhere in the middle of clearing the left entrance — we have a U-shaped driveway — the call came in that school was cancelled for the day. Why? I’m not really sure. They’d already cleared the street, and there was only about two inches in the driveway.

So my loop was interrupted by the weather and school cancellations. While the one day interruption was “pleasant,” it won’t fix the stuck way I’ve been feeling as of late.

My loop currently looks something like this: wake up. Work out. Get C dressed. Make C breakfast. Make and pack lunch and snack for C. Find something for J to eat because he doesn’t like eggs. Shower. Brush C’s teeth. Get him on the school bus. Spend the day entertaining J/cleaning/attempting to work on side projects. Rinse, lather, repeat.

I also find myself having the same conversation with the boys every day — “Stop fighting!”, “Pick up your toys!”, “Go to the potty!” It’s a miracle I still know other words in the English language.

There are some days when I’m so sick of the routine that I want to just let the boys go wild(er than usual) and let the chips fall where they may.

Of course, I can’t do that. I’ve been working on potty training J this week and have to make sure he doesn’t pee behind the couch…again. The boys also have a tendency to get into wrestling matches, usually at C’s instigation, and I have to make sure they don’t kill each other. So what’s a burnt out, stuck-in-a-rut mama to do?

Keep calm, take a breath, and soldier on. Also, hide in the pantry and eat snack pack Pringles…and pour a glass of wine while making dinner.

But seriously, I think I need to find something to balance out the everyday mundanity. Committing to my #65in365 goal is helping to keep me a little bit sane. I get most of my reading done when J insists that I can’t work, and I must watch Cocomelon/Little Angels/Blippi/Spidey and his Amazing Friends with him. Outside of that, though, what’s a stuck-in-a-rut mama to do?

I know that these things I’m complaining about are all part of motherhood, but isn’t that all the more reason to find a way to achieve the “just treading water” feeling of only communicating with toddlers all day? What’s your thing to help combat stay-at-home mom burnout?

Quiet is Never Quiet Enough

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C requested that we make gingerbread cookies after learning about them at school last week. I figured, sure, why not. I found a recipe, and J and I picked up the ingredients I didn’t already have in my spice cabinet. The suggestion of cookies was actually perfect as I decided we’d package them up and give them away to C’s bus drivers and his teachers as a “thank you”/Christmas gift. I love it when a plan comes together!

The boys and I combined and mixed the ingredients in the afternoon when C got home from school, then set the dough to chill. Fun fact that I did not know going into this: gingerbread dough needs to chill before the cookies can be cut.

Dough chilling, I make dinner, hubby comes home, we eat, and take a tubby. Then the boys and I head back to the kitchen to roll out the dough and bust out the cookie cutters. We make gingerbread men, gingerbread women, gingerbread kids, Santas, reindeer, ornaments, and candy canes. I pop the first batch in the oven, and the boys stare through the window to watch them bake. Another fun fact: although the dough needs to chill forever, the cookies back up in about ten minutes!

Once all the cookies are made and set out to cool, we head to bed. Around 2 AM, C wakes up. It takes about thirty minutes, but I get him back to sleep. I, however, am wide awake. I decide to be productive. I went across the hall into our junk room-turned-my-office to create labels for the cookie bags. I was still fussing with spacing and print alignment when my husband walked by and said, “There you are. I was wondering where you were.”

After he left for work, I decided that at 5 AM, with the kids still asleep, this would be the best opportunity to get my workout in alone. Usually, the boys wake up, follow me to the basement, and lay all over me when I do floor exercises.

I sneak into my bedroom because, of course, they are sleeping in there, change my clothes, then go down to the hall to our other bathroom to pee and put my shoes on. Guys, I promise you I made ZERO noise until I flushed the toilet on the other end of the house. Our house isn’t that big, but they shouldn’t have been able to hear the flush. Either way, I go down into the basement where, during COVID, A (my husband) went a little crazy filling it with gym equipment. I was just throwing my leg over the exercise bike seat when I heard it. Little, pounding footsteps going down the hall. J comes down the stairs and stops in front of the bike, and with sleepy eyes, he looks up at me and says, in a tone that doesn’t match his tired eyes, “Hi, Mommy!”

I laughed so hysterically that I thought I was going to cry. He reached his little arms up, and I had no choice but to scoop him up, soak up all that cute sleepy warmth, and snuggle my baby for 22 minutes as I rode the stationary bike. He wouldn’t let me put him down because he was scared. Of what? I have no idea. I finally convinced him that if he got down and handed me the remote control, he could watch anything he wanted on the television while I finished up.

I finished my ride, then proceeded to my floor exercise routine, which involved J trying to lay on me when I went down from a sit-up or sitting on my lap between sets. The whole time all I could think was: I should have just let it mellow…