As you all know, I have frequent nightmares. This isn’t new, I’ve had nightmares all my life, and at this point, I’m more or less used to the fact that as often as I have a good dream, I have a really bad one. I don’t let them stick with me, and apart from a few minutes of wakefulness post-dream, I’m able to sleep through essentially undisturbed.
However, going to bed has become incredibly stressful over the past week or so. Why? Because I know that I’m going to be woken up some time in the night. Not only will I be woken up, but I’ll have to get out of bed to do something. You see, every night, at least one of two things happens:
- Sam will start meowing. His meow is quite loud, and while I’ve learned to filter it out and sleep through it, Leah hasn’t. She’s afraid he’ll wake up Liam. Which, of course, he probably would. So when Sam meows, I have to get up and either go downstairs and soothe him back to calm, or dump him out on the balcony, where he can meow to his heart’s content.
- Liam will wake up crying. He had been sleeping beautifully through the night, but since his top teeth started coming in in late January, he’s been much more restless and wakeful at night. These past 2 weeks have been fairly brutal though: he’ll wake up, sometime between 2 and 4am, and it will take somewhere between 1.5 and 3 hours for us to get him back to sleep. For 90% of that time, he’s crying. Both Leah and I are at our wits’ end over this, both of us just so over-tired and cranky.
Because of these factors, I can acutely feel my stress-level rise when I think about going to bed. I’ve been staying up longer than I should, staring aimlessly at the TV until after midnight, just because I don’t want to “start the process” of being rudely awoken from my sleep. I gotta think that not going to sleep because you’re so scared of being awoken from your sleep is not a healthy attitude ;).
Leah’s cracking open our various sleep-books today, and hopefully we’ll come up with a plan to tackle this, and find a way to help Liam sleep through the night again. I don’t think we’ll find an answer for Sam, but I’m willing to put up with getting up and dumping him on the balcony if Liam’ll sleep through the night.