Darkness

They say it is darkest before dawn. Every night I hope and pray that the previous night was that darkest hour, but every morning dawn comes and I've only managed to accumulate a total of 2, 3, 4 hours of sleep and I know I've got a day to survive and more nights ahead of me.

Each night is a little worse than the one that came before it. I have begun to feel detached -- from myself, from my spouse, from my child. I look at her and know I should feel an overpowering love but instead feel frustration and dread, especially between the hours of 8pm and 8am. I would suggest post-partum depression, but it's clearly sleep deprivation, and taking an anti-depressant isn't going to do anything to fix the fact that my child has gone back to only sleeping when held, and only when held by me. (We thought we had fixed the problem, but it's gotten much, much worse, and my back hurts so much I can no longer sleep in the chair while she sleeps.) She usually gives me one 2-3 hour stretch of nighttime sleep not on me, but you never know when it will come, so I usually spend most of it anxious, awaiting the sounds of her stirring.

I would say I'm nearing a breaking point, but I think whatever that point was has passed already. Somehow, when morning comes, I manage to pull it together and put on my big girl underwear and go about my day. Then nighttime comes, and I feel shattered and cracked again.

Anniversary, Apathy, Exhaustion: Catching Up

So I have had a bunch of posts that I've meant to, well, post, but haven't had time. So, in order to catch up, I'm just going to do a bulleted list of stuff, starting with the good and moving to the less good:

• P and I celebrated our four year anniversary last week (the 20th). Four years is the fruit & flowers (traditional) or appliances (modern) anniversary. So P sent me flowers and gave me a new air conditioner for our room (we had given ours to Harry). I sent him an edible arrangement (with the anniversary sampler added on) and got him a second guitar for Guitar Hero. Very romantic :) On Saturday, my SIL babysat, and P and I enjoyed a fantastic dinner out, then went to see Harry Potter at the IMAX. It was an awesome night -- wonderful meal, great movie, better company. Happy anniversary, P!
• Harry has begun table food in earnest. We have ordered him food off the kids menu at a couple of restaurants. It has been quite messy but fun. It seems he will eat anything with tomato sauce. And he loves blueberry pancakes.
• I find myself somewhat busy at work. I've been having a lot of trouble motivating lately (see next bullet), though, which isn't good. I have a lot more to say on this, but it's not really a bullet list kind of thing.
• Lately (like, since June), I've been feeling, well, not myself. I guess that's the best way to describe it. I've been feeling tired and run down and generally apathetic. I just don't care about much of anything. Most of the time, whatever I'm doing, I'd rather be doing something else. And beyond apathy, I am definitely feeling some degree of antipathy when it comes to work. I have waves of feeling differently, but they are infrequent and unpredictable. And I have been eating too much, in a very mindless way, and not healthy food, which makes me feel more run down and generally bad about myself. I had an appointment with my doctor last week (for a physical) and brought it up with her. She did a bunch of bloodwork to rule out any physical causes, and it all came back normal. Her best guess (and mine, I suppose) is depression. She recommended an anti-depressant. But the last time I tried one (in college), I had a very bad reaction to it (severe anxiety -- severe enough to land me in health services, where they doped me up on a boatload of sedatives). So I'm reluctant.
• My tiredness/run down-ness is not being helped by the fact that Harry has gone from being a great sleeper to being a mediocre (at best) one. After sleeping through the night since 10 weeks, we have now had several weeks of wake-ups. Some wake-ups are quick, others not so much. And he pulls himself to standing and will wail on and on, so we can't really just let him cry it out, though we may try some modified form of it tonight in the hope of finding something, anything, that might help. For an example of what we've been dealing with, on Tuesday I was working until about 1am. I then couldn't sleep. I finally fell asleep at 2 or so Within 5 minutes, Harry woke up screaming. When I went in there, his elbow was stuck in the bars of the crib (his actual elbow -- his hand and body were still inside, but his elbow was outside). I unstuck it and rubbed his back for a bit. He lifted his head up (which is generally an indication that he's about to sit, then stand), so I picked him up to settle him, but he was like a sack of potatoes. I put him back down a minute later. He moved around a little and fell back to sleep. This was one of the better nights. But I then had trouble getting back to sleep. So last night I decided to go to bed early-ish (10:30 or so), since I'd only slept 3 hours the night before. But Harry didn't like that plan. He woke up at 10:45, screaming. We let it go for a few minutes, but it got worse rather than better. P went in to rock him, but Harry continued to scream/cry for an hour or more, preventing me from sleeping. He finally calmed down, but wasn't sleepy. At 12:15, I took over, and after 15 minutes he was asleep. But he woke up when I tried to leave. By that point I was too tired to deal, so I turned off the monitor so I could sleep and let P take over again. Harry didn't fall asleep until 1:15. During the time he was awake, we tried Motrin and Orajel, in case it was teething. P gave him a bottle, in case it was hunger. He had a few farts, but not enough for me to think it was gas. He's pooped a bunch lately, so it's not constipation (though the poops have been wetter than usual, but not so wet as to make me worry about a bug). P thinks it's developmental, relating to an approaching language development, since he tends to spend his settled-but-not-sleepy time "talking." (He says "duck" and "book" (and other things, but mainly those two) over and over, pointing at any number of things, most of which are neither ducks nor books.) I'm nearing a breaking point.

And that's all I have to say about those things for now. Advice and/or assvice on any of those topics is welcome.

Wee Hours

It's very quiet at this hour. The clock ticking over my shoulder. The boiler humming. The pipes clanging as they work to keep the house warm.

I feel the soft in and out of your breathing, the warmth of your breath against my collarbone, the rise and fall of your chest against mine. You've made it clear that this is the only place you're sleeping tonight. And as much as I'd like to be sleeping too, I love that you find comfort in me, your mama.

Slow Day

Two things:

1. It does appear to be the farts/poops that result in Harry's need for a middle of the night change/feeding. Coincidentally enough after last night's post, Harry hasn't pooped since yesterday's explosion AND he slept until 6:30 this morning. Whoo-hoo! (Though I fear it's going to be very messy the next time he goes.)
2. Also, Harry really likes his playmat:

(Evidently, on day 24 of Nablopomo I run out of things to talk about.)

The One About Poop (I warned you)

For a couple of weeks now, Harry has been going to bed at 9 and getting up some time between 3:30 and 5, getting changed and nursing, then going back to sleep until some time between 6 and 8. (No, his one night of the ten hour sleep didn't repeat itself.) To me, this is a perfectly acceptable schedule. Yeah, I'd love it if he decided to always sleep until 7 or later without waking in the night, but I can definitely work with this. I always assumed he woke up because he was hungry.

So, last night, we heard farts at 12:45, which was sadly only 45 minutes after we went to bed (yes, we're stupid) and only minutes after I fell asleep. Harry also heard himself fart and woke up. P decided that they weren't just farts, so he got up to change him. (He was right.) And being very awake post-change, Harry decided he was hungry. So I was up until 1:30. He then slept until 6:30 and was ready to start his day.

I then thought back. Pretty much every night, his waking is immediately preceded by an audible fart, the kind that wakes us all up (and is almost always accompanied by poop). Maybe if he didn't always fart himself awake (or decided to poop during the day instead of always in the middle of the night), we could all be getting a bit more sleep around here. Sigh.

While I'm already talking about poop, Harry erupted during coffee hour after church this morning. When I picked him up to determine whether he was the source of the smell, poop dripped down his leg, into his sock, onto his carseat, and onto his hat sitting in his carseat. It seemed to be everywhere but on me (hooray for small miracles). It took me 15 minutes to clean him up, get him into a new diaper, and into a new outfit. When I got home, we had to figure out how to take the cover off the carseat and into the wash. It was truly nasty. I never feel confident with him in a FuzziBunz (it never seems tight enough around the leg), and apparently it was with good reason.

Consoled

Last night, we eventually decided just to bring him upstairs to initiate his bedtime routine a little earlier than usual (in the past, he has refused to go to sleep any earlier than 9:40 -- he'll do his whole bedtime routine and be nice and calm, then we'll put him down and he'll start crying again right away and won't stop until we come get him and rock him until he's actually ready for bed). At the end of his routine, he went right to sleep (albeit in the swing -- we had been working on getting him to sleep in his crib, but he kept waking up coughing and/or screaming. He finally decided on Monday that he just wouldn't sleep there at all, so we'll wait another week or so and try again. Tonight he's back in the carseat, which seems less problematic than the swing and is where he had been sleeping for a while now). He then slept for seven hours, which is about the most he ever sleeps in a stretch (and he'd only done it twice before). We'll see how he does tonight after another day without enough naps (one 2 hour nap in the afternoon plus two short -- 30 minutes or less -- ones in the morning, which for him isn't a lot since he doesn't sleep a ton at night, usually only giving us 2 or so hours more after a 5-7 hour stretch).

Okay, that's enough parentheses for one post.