Getting some zzzz's

When I was pregnant with my first chld everyone kept telling me to get lots of sleep. Enjoy it while you can! After 9 months of everyone telling me to sleep I was sort of tired of the advice. Ok, ok, I'll be tired when I have kids I get it...

Then my daughter was born and I was exhausted!! I mean this wasn't the typical run of the mill baby here. We are talking about an amazing child who seriously did not seem to need to sleep at all. I mean, the whole, "sleep when baby sleeps" mantra was definitely not working when she would only sleep about 20 minutes at a time and the nights weren't much better. Oh sure we would get that solid chunk of sleep from 2am till 6am so I should have been ok, but really that didn't cut it for my new mommy brain that was struggling with the new 24/7 responsibility.

Thankfully at age 4 she is sleeping for 10-12 hours a night and her little sister for the most part has been a better sleeper...that is until she reached about 18 months and now we are struggling with her occassional night wakings. However it is nothing compared to the insanity of their earlier months. But this week we have been dealing with a spring cold that hit our 4 year old last week and our 2 year old this week and once again we are reminded about how tiring it is to be a parent.

Between the coughing fits that they don't even wake up for and the actual waking up because they are miserable, we have been getting maybe 3-4 actual hours of sleep in a night all week. This of course makes the days incredibly long as we operate in a dysfunctional haze. Oh the joys of parenthood!

My husband's newly married friend called and during their conversation my husband brought up that we hadn't been sleeping much this week. "It can't be that bad" he replied... We could tell him of course about all of the challenges and give him the advice that we received of "enjoy your sleep now"... but as with most of the triumphs and turbulations of parenthood, most things have to be experienced in order to truly understand!