Saturday, September 10, 2011

It's a Not So Wonderful Life

Here we are at the beach enjoying spending time with Stephanie and her parents Ken & Kris.  The aquarium visit was wonderful and the dinner was awesome.  It came time for Ken and Kris to go back to their RV and Stephanie went to bed but Travis and I stayed up a little longer enjoying the quiet.  We were just about to get up and go to bed when we heard it.  It was.....Sam screaming.  Of course.  Alright it's 10:30pm what  is the best thing to do in this case?  Well maybe if we leave him he will go back to sleep? No.  Maybe if we just rock him he will go back to sleep? No.  How about a dose of Tylenol and teething gel since teething may be happening?  No.  Now it is 11:30 and he still is unhappy and I am trying not to nurse him so he doesn't think a midnight snack is now on the menu.  Well guess what?  I am tired and I haven't slept in 3 days and I just want to get to go to bed so I break down and nurse him.  He is seeming disinterested and he keeps biting me so I cut him off after trying to get him to nurse for about 30 minutes.  It is now midnight and he has been put back into his bed and is screaming his fool head off.

Travis and I are sharing a room with him and have decided that we are not going in there to try and "Sleep" through the blood curdling screaming 2 feet from our bed.  We choose to hunker down in the living room on the couch and the recliner.  After another 20 minutes of enduring the horror I decided that I will try to rock him again.  I bring him out to the living room, start the dishwasher, and rock vigorously enough to make it to the moon.  It eventually works after 30 minutes of serious restraint so he can't throw his head back and arch his back.  I quietly take him back to his bed and stand in the room for a few minutes to make sure he is really asleep.  I go out to the living room to wake Travis, who has fallen asleep on the couch, to let him know he can get into the bed now.  We both creep back into the room, sneak into the sheets, and get settled to quickly fall asleep.  We are in the bed maybe 3 minutes and he wakes only to start screaming yet again.  At this point he is dry, fed, warm, burped, drugged, and tired.  What the hell is left to do?!!  We both want to scream and are now starting to turn on each other and point fingers as to who messed up and woke him up.

After grabbing the blankets and pillows we trundled back out to the living room to try and go to bed.  We had come to the conclusion that he was just going to have to scream it out since all our efforts were being thwarted at every turn.  We restarted the dishwasher to try to drown out the screaming and get some sleep ourselves.  This plan seemed good on paper but trying to sleep while your baby was screaming for some unknown reason is quite difficult and I was straining to hear him over the dishwasher.  A mother through and through.  After an hour of listening to my baby scream, restarting the dishwasher again, and my husband snoring, I gave into the extreme exhaustion and fell asleep around 3:30am.  I awoke to the sound of screaming at 4:30am and was super concerned that Sam was still screaming and rushed back to the bedroom door only to find that the screaming was coming from a different room and a different boy.

Ben woke from a bad dream and was terrified to be in his room without me.  I had tried to talk to him and reassure him that no monsters were in his room but he was too scared for talking to do the trick.  He was so scared that I had to lay down with him and he had to hold onto my hair and neck to make sure I wasn't going to leave him.  After about 45 minutes and half my body being numb I was able to get out from his vice like grip and stumble back to the couch to try and get a smidge more sleep.  Of course the kids were up long before we wanted them to be and morning came faster than it should have but bags under your eyes is one of the true marks of being a parent.

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