sleep

Our family has gotten poor sleep for so many nights now I've lost track.  It used to be that I could get by with 5.  Now, I need at least six.  Having gotten less than six for so many days now, I struggled yesterday and said if it wasn't any better that night (last night) then I'd be calling in sick today.  In the end, sleep was good last night and I went to work. Between the heat, a 2.8 mile run in the middle of the day and the previous bad sleep, I was dragging a bit by the end of the day and had to apologize for blinking my way through some 1:1's. I wasn't cranky and didn't feel argumentative, but I was still quite tired. Am quite tired.

Rachel's always had trouble with sleep - often preferring to stay up if she woke up, even if it was 11 or 12 at night. At first, she'd wake us and we'd have fights about her going back to bed. Eventually I'd just turn her light out and go back to bed and she'd turn it back on and play or read. Then she finally realized that if she didn't wake us, she could avoid all of that and by the time she was found out, it would typically be time to get up anyhow. Her trip to the ER was after a night of staying up playing instead of sleeping, though she blames the school's blind corner on the playground and not a increased reaction time due to sleepiness as the reason she collided with the other boy, breaking his tooth and getting a forehead full of stiches.

Ben's been seeming to have much trouble with sleep lately. He had been doing pretty well, to the point that we had transitioned him to his bed. Until that night in November when he stayed up all night playing and then collapsed the next day from sheer exhaustion, causing four seizures, a visit to two ERs, an ambulance ride and a new diagnosis. Thankfully we've been seizure-free since, but any time he's awake in the middle of the night, I forget all about the medication and simply am just stressed out to no end, deathly afraid it's going to cause another seizure.

So when the children can't sleep, I can't sleep. Sometimes I go downstairs and sleep on the couch, but often it takes me awhile to fall back asleep, needing to turn on music but it doesn't always drown out his shrieks of joy (I don't know what lying in a crib in near darkness can be found to be funny.)

So Ben was asleep by about 7:30, but less than 90 minutes later, he's awake again. I'm concerned we're in for a rough night.