Sleep (or lake thereof)

For the past 3.5 years my life has revolved around two main things: sleep and poop (not necessarily in that order).

New parents will know what I mean. Meaningful, consistent sleep is hard to come by in the first year of a baby's life. You work hard to get the new arrival on some sort of a nap/bedtime schedule more for your own sanity than anything else; days without naps are the toughest.

And poop--I know far too much about this subject. All manners of ailments, menus, and food intolerances can be diagnosed with one look at a diaper. Is she well enough to go to daycare tomorrow? Look at the diaper. What did he have for dinner last night? Look at the diaper.

The past few weeks both of these topics have been at the forefront of my mind. And I've had a lot of time to think about them, because nobody has been sleeping.

For my part, I've been working late most nights, often into the single-digit hours. (This also explains my lack of posts recently.) Celia and Andres, thankfully, do not share the exact same schedule--she goes to bed around 7:45, and he follows at 8:30. This worked great for months; once we put Andres to bed, we wouldn't hear anything from their bedroom until 6:30 the next morning. Perfect, right?

Unfortunately that schedule is a distant memory. Here is what we've been living through this week:

7:45  Celia goes to bed

8:30  Andres goes to bed

10:00  Celia wakes up crying (probably from her head cold); and eventually goes back to sleep (ed note: as I write this post, 10:51 pm, Celia and Natalia have fallen asleep in the loveseat).

1:00  Andres falls out of bed, wakes up, and cries. I go into his room to collect him and find him curled up next to his bed, clearly out of sorts. So as not to wake up Celia for a second time, I pick up Andres and bring him into our room where he falls asleep.

2:00  I go to bed

6:30  Somebody wakes up and the day has started.

And this schedule has become typical. It seems like every week we are dealing with a new cold or an interruption in the kids' general bedtime routine (like New Years eve, when we let them stay up for a while), so their schedules have been off. This wouldn't be as hard to deal with if they had separate rooms, but they do not...so whenever one of them begins to wake up, we do whatever we can to keep the fussing one away from the sleeping one.

[Another brief story: this past Wednesday I was out late and came home to find Celia wide awake with Natalia in our bed. I took Celia so Natalia could try to get some sleep; it was clear that Celia was not going to sleep anytime soon. We played for about 20 minutes and then, at 2 am (!), I was faced with a decision: what do I do with my daughter? If I put her in her room, I risk waking up Andres if she cries...but if I keep her in bed, will she sleep at all? As fortune would have it, Andres picked this exact moment to fall out of his bed--so I put Celia in her crib, picked up Andres, and transferred him to our room. I couldn't believe that all three of us were awake at 2 in the morning.]

I'm not sure how long we can sustain this for. In the short-term, we've put down a mattress in our room for Andres' nightly visits; this way he elbows Natalia less, and I actually get some room in my own bed. Hurrah. But I think we have to find him a bed that he will not fall out of...hopefully, at that point, he will go back to sleeping through the night, which will make all of our lives easier. And Celia just has to fight off these colds she has been getting.

On to number two--literally.

I'm proud of my big boy because he has been working hard on his bathroom skills, and is now mostly toilet trained. This is HUGE. Up until recently, he had expressed little interest and MUCH reluctance to doing anything on the toilet...but something has now clicked, and he's doing a great job in there. I think our combination of bribery, patience, practice, and more bribery helped him turn the corner.

One of the side effects of trying to get him toilet trained is that poop is a frequent subject of conversation. I will spare you the various things we talk about; you can probably imagine what they are. The good news is that the conversations seem to be working.

Ok Andres just woke up...time to make the transition. More later.