As my high school biology teacher used to put it: Adapt, Migrate, or Die…. I am am choosing to adapt.

For those of you who follow me on Facebook, you know that the whole sleeping thing has not been going well for awhile now. I posted about this not long ago, and since then things have not improved.  I think it has been about 2 months of broken sleep. Now, not every night has been a bad night.  I think I normally have about 5-6 “bad” nights a week. The thing is, they have become so frequent that they really have become my new normal and I have learned to adapt. Before I go into the crazy stuff that I do at 2 am, let me talk about what I have learned:

• Going in and patting her back, or trying to rock her back to sleep will only make me really frustrated. She is awake and playing. Normally with her feet. No amount of patting or rocking is going to make her go to sleep faster.  It’s better if I just watch her on the monitor.
• SLEEP IN!!!! After one of these nights she typically sleeps in.  Therefore, so do I. I just prep everything to start her daytime feed and Mark starts it when he gets up to work.
• Stay busy. I have monitor her on our video monitor due to her tube when she is up. While I would love to lay down, it just ends up being crazy broken and light sleep that leaves me feeling more exhausted.
• When emailing your child’s doctors at 2 am, take a deep breath and re-read things before hitting send. Luckily I haven’t embarrassed myself yet, but I have been quite desperate in a few emails.

So, what do I do when I am up for 2.5-4 hours in the middle of the night? Here is a list!

• Exercise! – One of the first things to go from my daytime activities when all of this started was exercise. Given, I can’t get a good cardio workout it, but I can do some basic strength training. I have found this works better than coffee to wake me up.
• Laundry – I fold laundry….. lots of laundry.  I can’t put it away in the middle of the night, but at least the first step it done.
• Write in my blog – This is another activity I don’t normally have time for during daylight hours. If I did work on this during the day while she sat in her crib for hours, it would be child neglect. At night, it’s sleep training!
• Work of projects – I work on my needlepoint, the family calendar and any other silent creative project.
• Watch trashy tv shows (very quietly) – This is something I can’t do during the day and something my husband does NOT enjoy watching with me. So, I can do it in the middle of the night in peace.

Normally by the time I get through a couple of the activities on this list, Lyra has drifted back to sleep. There really isn’t anything else I can do to make her go back to sleep.  Trust me, I have been working on it with her doctors and therapists. So, I just have to adapt and hope she grows out of this phase soon. Until then, I have already exercised and written in my blog tonight.  I guess now it is time to fold laundry!

We took this picture to send to a friend back in DC as a way to say “hi”. It’s one of my favorites.