Too Tired to Think of a Clever Title

I talk a lot about sleep. I know, I know, boring young mom! It is such a dominating struggle in my life, though.

My relationship with sleep became extremely rocky three and a half years ago when I suffered a miscarriage. A few short weeks after that tragedy, my husband left for his first deployment in Iraq. Devastated and anxious, I was left to sleep about an hour, sometimes two, every night.

A year and some change later, a healthy 8 lb 11 oz baby boy was placed in my arms, and that very day, my insomnia was healed instantly. I could fall asleep before my head even hit the pillow! Unfortunately, being a baby, Luke was a sleepless lunatic, and we spent lots of QT together through the nights.

Another pregnancy, more pregsomnia, a toddler who still didn't sleep through the night, another delivery, another baby who refuses to sleep, a crazy dog who gets hunger pangs at 5:30 am, blah blah blah...in the last three and a half years, I think I've had about four episodes of deep sleep. But it's not the time I spend awake at night that bothers me, per se. It's the side effects during the day time that are the worst.

Ask Joe, and he'll tell you that exhaustion makes me mean. He's suffered enough during my last weeks of each pregnancy to write a book. I won't go too far into specifics since his mother reads this blog; but just as an example, one morning when I was a week away from delivering George and hadn't slept even five minutes the night before, he'd upset hormonal, tired me big time. As a means of making me get over it, he told me he'd take Luke to the park to let me get some rest. I responded that he should just leave Luke at home, and then I gave him a recommendation of a different place he could go. I concur, exhaustion makes me mean!

Another irritating side effect is the nonsense that comes out of me in words and actions. Luke will ask me for a story. "Sure," I'll tell him, "but you have to milk the cow this time." Huh? Recently, I was shopping for groceries and I wanted to turn down a new aisle, but I couldn't find the turn signal on my shopping cart. I stood there for a few seconds, becoming increasingly frustrated with each flick of my hand as I subconsciously searched for that blasted turn signal. After about four tries, I blinked my eyes a few times and snapped out of it, hoping nobody had seen my erratic behavior.

Last week, on a typical weekday morning, I was sipping my coffee and Luke was munching on his toast. "Where's Daddy?" he asked. All of a sudden, I was like a contestant on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" I know this, I thought, looking like a deer in the headlights. "Ummmmm...," I said a few times, stalling as much as I could in hopes of coming up with the right answer, "ummmmm...." Luke interrupted me. "Is he at work?" he asked. "YES! GOOD!" I responded, "He's at work!" Whew! Then I sipped on some more coffee and stared out the window.

Probably the most irritating thing to me is the amount of things I leave half-finished. For instance, I'll walk around with mascara on one eye but not the other. I'll have clean laundry piled up, half folded, half not. It's like I can never finish anything I've started, and I don't even realize it as I float fuzzily from one thing to the next.

In conclusion,