When exhaustion sets in

Since we spent hours at the beach, Hen doing much running from one area of the beach to another, I figured we'd try a night with no melatonin to see how Bean did. He ended up falling asleep around 9:30p.m. He woke again shortly after 4a.m. I took him to the bathroom and we stayed up for half an hour or so and then we both went back to sleep. He did not sleep in the next morning. By the time dinner rolled around, Hen was looking TIRED.

I thought it was the Queen, dahling.

Here's what I knew about the movie going into the theatre tonight - 1. Meryl Streep was in it; 2. It was called The Iron Lady.

Here's what I learned while there - it is about Margaret Thatcher.

Hen had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

I was met in the parking lot by one frustrated teacher carrying one unhappy little boy when I arrived at school today. Oy vey. The lad was throwing barkdust and hitting adults. This is so very not awesome. I feel as if I am failing Hen in some fundamental way. Not only am I to blame for taking him to school on a day when I knew he was seriously sleep-deprived*, I have been unsuccessful at teaching him the skills he needs so he can act appropriately when I'm not there policing him. When I dropped him off this morning I joked about his lack of sleep. I figured it would be one of those times when the kid manages to keep it together until he's with mom again, expecting I'd get the hellish attitude after we returned home. Did I misjudge that or what? I'm not sure what to do - punishment seems wrong because he can't completely control his emotions, particularly when he is not operating at his best, and talking seems ineffective. Do I just reiterate our policies on barkdust throwing (we can play with barkdust, we cannot throw it at people) and hitting (we can tell people we're upset, we cannot hit them). 

The little boy is sleeping on our bed right now. In the car ride home, he asked me if I was sad. I said yes. He wanted to know why. I told him I was sad because he is a good boy but he made the wrong choices today. He became quiet. When I looked at him a few seconds later, he had nodded off. He woke up when we got home and asked me to remove his boots and jacket before falling back asleep. He's a good kid. I would hate for him to be labeled as something different and become the kid all other children and parents avoid.

*Hen is sleep-deprived quite often. Melatonin helps him get to sleep but has him waking up much earlier. Today he woke up at 4a.m. and was not able to get back to sleep. If I kept him from school on days when he was sleep-deprived, he'd rarely go.

Tired

I am too tired to blog. That is all.

Desperate

Saturday morning goodbye

Darr, standing at the door with his ski gear: You going back to sleep?

Me, yawning: Yeah. <kiss> Have a good day skiing. <Close door. Return to bed. Henry wakes up two minutes later. Get out of bed. Start day. Argh.>

Perhaps not the best choice for pre-bed time wind down

Dinosaur ROAR! from Christie Glynn on Vimeo.

Practicing me pirate speak

Sure, 4 a.m. dance parties are all fun and games until someone gets their eye poked. This we learned last night, or shall I say early this morning, when Monsieur Henry in a moment of sublime ball happiness - we were reading a book and it had pictures of balls - enthusiastically signed ball (we use the arm-throwing ball sign, in retrospect this seems a bad choice). And in a moment of mom is slow because it's 4am tiredness, his finger connected with my eyeball and it resulted in a corneal abrasion. A "pretty nasty scratch" according to the optometrist we saw this morning. Luckily the event came at the end of the party because I was able to put away the food, collect baby, change his diaper, turn off the lights, and return to bed without waking up pops. In two words, it hurts. But the doc okay'd the use of Vicodin - ah, sweet, sweet Vicodin - and since I am no longer incubating a human I have no qualms about using pain meds. Darr is on toddler and dog duty, earning him the Awesome Husband of the Week award, while I am sequestered in my dark room trying not to see. There's no eye patch but negotiations for parrot purchasing has begun and I've muttered more than one "argh" while stumbling my partially blind behind around the condo.

Photo credit: www.eyedoctors.com

New score

I realize now that old high score is embarrassingly low. The new one is 287,582. Look out 300,000, here I come!

After midnight math

Recommended number of uninterrupted hours of sleep per night for adults = 7 to 8
Number of days Henry has been on the planet = 520

If I was getting the recommended number of uninterrupted hours of sleep per night since Henry's birth I would have slept a total of 3640 to 4160 hours.

On average, I'd say I get about five hours of uninterrupted sleep. This means I have a sleep deficit of approximately 1040 to 1560 hours. (Even more since during those first few weeks/months I was lucky to get three hours of uninterrupted sleep.)

No wonder I'm so Goddamned tired.

Admittedly I am very bad about getting to bed at a reasonable hour. I could sleep more if I hit the sack when Henry went to sleep. But to semi-function as a human, I need some downtime in which I'm not taking care of Huck. So, I often get to sleep about the same time Henry decides to wake up because he's hungry or wants to play or just needs to move into our bed.

Here's what the Mayo Clinic had to say on the subject:

Although some people feel rested on as few as five hours of sleep a night, recent studies call this notion into question. Researchers have found that people who sleep so little over many nights don't perform as well on complex mental tasks as do people who get closer to seven hours of sleep a night. Additionally, researchers have found that adults who get much more or less than seven hours of sleep a night have a higher mortality rate than do adults who sleep about seven hours a night. ...

At any age, getting enough sleep boosts your immune system. Sleep also helps your nervous system work properly. Likewise, too little sleep can leave you drowsy and unable to concentrate. Lack of sleep also impairs memory and physical performance.

It's no great surprise that my mental acuity is slipping. I just sort of expected this would happen to me when I was nearing my 80th birthday.

3am babies

Occasionally Henry will wake up around 3am. Why does he do this? The only reason I am up now (at 4:25am) is because he woke up over an hour ago. Sometimes I am able to grab Monsieur Henry from his crib, bring him into our room, and nurse him back to sleep. This is preferred as there is a minimal amount of sleep disruption for all. But on other days, such as today, not only did he want to nurse a bit, he then started rolling around in the bed, climbing on his dad, and being a general, non-sleeping baby nuisance. This earned Henry a ticket to the living room via mom express. A couple games of baby ball (where the ball can go in any direction at any given moment regardless of baby's intent), two enthralling stories (one in which this guy likes animals and names nearly all of them "Bob," and the other in which a mom agrees to love her kid even when she does bad things - apropos given the situation, eh?), several bites of hot dog, and one exciting diaper change later, Henry is back in his crib and on his way to sleepdom. I honestly can't recall the last time I had a full eight hours of sleep without interruption.

Difficult decision

We very much think Henry is on the road to good health, but he isn't there yet. A blood draw on Friday showed his neutrophil count had only gone up a tiny bit, from 116 when he was discharged from the hospital to 194. He's still 306 away from the critical mark and well below the normal range. Doctors hope this number will continue to increase during the next month. We hope so too. This low number means Henry cannot return to daycare. There is a significant part of me that feels compelled to forgo law school for now so that I may be here to take care of Henry. I mean, I got in once, right? I can conceivably get in again. And maybe then it'll be at a time when there isn't so much stress at home. If you thought criminal law was confusing before, wait till you try to learn it when your baby is being transferred to the oncology ward. Even though we are home now, it is nearly impossible to shut out thoughts of Henry and concentrate on the reading, of which there is a large quantity. While I got through the majority of it this week, I'm not sure how much of it I retained. The other part of me, though, is thinking that when Henry is better in a month and returns to daycare I will have essentially given up law school to provide one month of care to Henry. What would you do?

On a side note...Holy schnikes, it is nearly 10:30pm and I have yet to get a picture of Henry today. I must go snag one before the day is over.

Update: Thanks for all of the responses. I'm no closer to a decision but it's still nice to hear your thoughts. Yes, we have absolutely considered a nanny. I am having zero luck locating one, though. If anyone has any suggestions, please advise. (To date I've searched and responded to several ads on craigslist, I've posted a job on sittercity.com, and we've posted a notice in our building.) It would certainly be easier to snag someone if we knew for sure if this was going to be just one month or for the whole school year.) I don't think it's really feasible to have Darren work from home as Henry requires too much attention and he wouldn't have enough time to get his work done. (He's a computer programmer.)

It never fails

No matter how little sleep Monsieur Henry got the night before...

No matter how quickly Darr prepares for work in the morning...

No matter how quietly I sneak out of bed to grab some breakfast...

Henry inevitably wakes up fifteen to twenty minutes after the front door closes and it's just the two of us and I've got as close to zero me-time as you can get. This makes for one VERY crabby wife. Just ask my husband. Poor guy had to listen as I imploded last night when, nearing eleven o'clock, our guy was no closer to bed than he was three hours earlier. THREE HOURS EARLIER. My response was to drive with baby to Tigard to return the bottles and cans that have been stacking up in our parking spot downstairs. While this journey did little to bring Henry closer to sleep, he did earn $2.65 for his piggy bank. And he learned it is literally never too late to recycle.

Dreams of a sleep-deprived mom

The other night I woke up from this beauty...

I'm driving down the highway with Henry in the backseat. It's dusk. There is a lot of traffic but not so much that we aren't all still able to travel at fairly high speeds (i.e. a minimum of fifteen miles per hour above the posted speed limit). I'm driving. I'm driving. I'm driving. Then I straddle two lanes. I don't know if I'm actually changing lanes to take an approaching exit or not. All of a sudden my tires hit the ruts and I'm thrown into a tailspin. In a second the car is turned so that I am perpendicular to the vehicles traveling behind me. There is a gigantic semi-truck coming. It crashes into me. The car crumples under the impact. Everything goes black.

This is when I wake up. It is the last dream I had when I did manage to catch more than a four-hour stretch of sleep, which isn't happening often. (Methinks the boy is going through a growth spurt and/or teething.) Well, there was one weird dream when an unstoppable cyborg assassin is sent by a race of artificially intelligent computer-controlled machines bent on the extermination of mankind to track down and kill future teenage Henry who is going to start a resistance against the machines but that particular dream most likely stems from my viewing of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles shortly before bedtime while nursing Henry to sleep.