sleep deprivation

As if I weren't feeling unattractive enough with my frizzball hair (thanks to the "still winter" weather we're having in Portland even though it is JUNE!), the bags under my eyes large enough to carry all of my crap on an intercontinental journey (thanks to my son thinking that 5:40 am is an awesome time to wake up), I now have the most tremendous cystic zit smack dab in the middle of my forehead.

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I hate this time of year for one particular reason. Ok, maybe two reasons, but the fact that the weather sucks is something I really need to come to terms with.

What I abhor the most is sitting on my duff for HOURS on end collecting, adding up, and organizing all of our receipts for the past year to get our taxes done. Every year I swear I am gonna be really organized about this and I set up my little file drawer with color coded file folders, tabs, etc, and it works great for the first 2 or so months, then the remaining 10 months out of the year every receipt my husband and I generate ends up in a paper bag in the closet...just dumped in there.

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Man....I know I said I'd be posting on here more often but life has been INSANE lately...and blogging took a back burner.....

Let me just put it this way....my daughter just cut her first 2 teeth and it was a most traumatizing, sleep depriving, nerve wrecking experience. My son had a full mouth of teeth by the age of one and the most he (or we) suffered from it was a drool rash and a little irritability. I was not expecting to go through teething as brutal as we just did...I think I've aged 25 years over this ordeal...

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I gotta tell ya, this freakin' lease we are stuck in won't be over soon enough. The bird shit has been somewhat cleaned up....they power washed our patio & the roof (but have not taken care of the bird infestation itself....go figure.) but now we are contending with new neighbors who have a penchant for partying every morning at 2:45 am. I am not kidding, this has gone on 3 mornings in a row.

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Tonight will be night 4 of my son's Ferberizing. Like I said in a previous post, on the second night he had a little bit of a cough and a fever and I wasn't sure what I was gonna do. My husband and I decided that if he cried while his Tylenol was still in effect, and if it didn't sound like a "Help me, I am drowning in phlegm!" cry, then we would continue with the sleep training.

This worked just fine, since he woke up twice within the four hours after I had dosed him up with Tylenol. Both times he called out & semi-cried for about 6 minutes before putting himself back to sleep. At this point we were supposed to wait 8 minutes before going in to settle him down, so I'd say this was a success. Last night he woke up again twice and just called my name out in several different intonations.....this was pretty hilarious I have to admit...and by the last two times he was calling out for me he was giggling....no joke! This child has been playing us for the past four months! Second time he woke up he seemed a little more irate, but managed to put himself back to sleep within 7 minutes.

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I started using the Ferber method two nights ago to get my son to sleep through the night again. First night, he woke up at 11:30 crying. As per the book, I let him cry for three minutes rather than rushing in to "save him". Then I walked in the room, walked him back to bed and promptly left. All this without any fanfare, totally mechanical, etc. I didn't so much as hear a whimper the rest of the night.

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My 2 1/2 year old son used to sleep like a dream. Starting at 4 months of age he would sleep from 8pm until 8am. At about a year of age he started going down at 7:30pm and waking up anywhere from 7:30am to 8:30am and my husband and I were feeling damn lucky. Even as a newborn he only woke up twice a night to feed. How good does it get, eh?

Well, maybe we should never have bragged about it or thanked God or whatever it is that we did wrong. But for the last 4 plus months this little boy of ours has only slept through the night three times. The rest of the time he has been waking up anywhere from 2-6 times a night, either crying or just calling to us from behind the door (he has had his door shut since he started sleeping in his own room at 4 months of age). We go in, he drinks some water, then goes back to sleep.

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So, my husband and I finally made the big move and bought our 26 month old son a toddler bed. We set it up last night and well, didn't sleep a wink the entire night. I now know what it feels like to be a zombie.

I had planned on keeping my son in his crib, which he loved, until he was three or thirteen....whichever. But 2 days ago I caught him doing a Superman on his belly on the crib railing which is pretty far off of the ground. Take note that my son has no sense of fear whatsoever......it scares the crap out of me. Thoughts of his sustaining a crippling neck injury is what drove us to go get the toddler bed. Why, oh why did he have to try and be a superhero on his freaking crib! But I guess he might as well learn to sleep out of his crib before the new kiddo arrives so that he doesn't associate the baby with being exiled from his former sleeping area.

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I am going to start incorporating reviews of baby products that I have used and loved into my blog postings once a week. Since I am a first time mom with a 19 month old toddler, I remember not knowing what the heck to register for before he was born and what we would need versus what seemed cool, etc. Hopefully my reviews will help any parents or parents-to-be out of this very same quandry!

The first product I want to review is the Angel Care Monitor by Bebe Sounds. This is by far the BEST baby monitor on the market. I wish I had known about this monitor before my son was born because it would have saved me a lot of sleep deprived nights when he was a newborn! What you don't realize before you have a baby of your own is that you will spontaneously wake up out of a deep sleep every 20 minutes just to check and see if your baby is still breathing. My son was a great sleeper from day one. He would only wake up once for a feeding at night so had we owned the Angel Care monitor in the beginning I could have really raked in some slumber and some sanity!

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