Cutting it Close

I actually thought about giving up on the NaBloPoMo thing tonight because I am seriously tired. Like the kind of tired where you feel wasted. I really don't sleep enough as it is, and the sleep I do get depends entirely on how well Charlotte is sleeping. Wow, that last sentence is like the most obvious thing a parent has ever said.

See, I haven't said anything about this before because even though I don't believe in "jinxing" things, this was too good to risk losing: Charlotte has been sleeping like a CHAMPION, lately. Like...a sleeping Olympian. She usually goes to bed and down for naps with a couple stories, a song or two, and a goodnight kiss, accompanied by a "See you in the morning," which she says to her stuffed animals when she pretends to put them to sleep. Yeah, it's cute.

If she wakes up in the middle of the night, I can usually get her back down with some binkies, a quick cuddle, and occasionally, another song. But, even then, she's been known to interrupt me (or Chris, but usually me) mid-song, point to her crib, and say "Night-night."

So it was a rude awakening (literally) when she woke up an hour and a half after I had finally fallen asleep and responded to every attempt to put her back down with, "Downstairs? Mommy's bed?" and subsequent wailing when those requests were denied. She did eventually come to bed with me so she could sit up, kick me in the face, and talk to me about her binkies. Chris came home to find us hanging out in bed. Me, half asleep and Charlotte, inexplicably wired. He was able to get her down, but I was on my own the next three times. There was Orajel application, a diaper change, a Tylenol dosage, more repetition of the same Beatles song than should be humanly possible, and a lot of sitting in my rocking chair alternately dozing and thinking, "What the hell am I going to do now?"

On top of all this, she wouldn't nap today. I don't know why she is trying to destroy me, but she is succeeding. Today the combination of sleep-deprivation and the fact that she once again, requested I leave the area in which she and her daddy were playing, resulted in me huddled in a corner of the kitchen, quietly crying.

I'm a pro, I am.