Red Bin, Blue Bin

My hands are so horribly chapped that I covered them in vaseline last night and then wore socks over them.  (Attractive, I know.)  Anywho...it made me think of when M and H were little and they wore those little mits over their hands so that they wouldn't scratch themselves.  As a result, I took a trip in the Wayback Machine and was reminiscing about Life when the girls were little and we were horribly sleep deprived and I thought I'd share.  (That is how my mind works, by the way.  Can you keep up?)

Everyone always tells expecting parents "get your sleep in now because once the baby gets here, you won't sleep for months."  Really, you can hear that come out of the mouths of 1,497 people but until you live it, you can't quite imagine or understand it.  I have never said that having "only one" baby at a time is easy (I've never said that because it's not true) but having two babes gives you permission to say that you are twice as tired...I don't know if that's really true but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.  I can see in my mind as if it was yesterday.  I went up to visit friends at work.  I cried and wept, sobbed, in the hallway.  I. Was. Just. So. Tired. I was laughing at myself at the time because I knew it was ridiculous and yet, I wanted to jump off a tall, steep cliff with no crying in the middle of the night babies in tow.

During the five days that we stayed in the hospital with the girls (or more appropriately the girls stayed in the hospital with me), I remember vividly the nurses telling us, "if you do nothing else, be sure you get them on the same sleep/eat schedule."  Looking back, we have never been offered such words of wisdom in our lives  We were great at keeping them on the same schedule.  I know that some in our lives mocked, joked, and teased at our Gestapo-like regime.  It worked.  These kids ate, slept and  breathed in sync.  Still do. 

H is on our left, M is on our right.  I love this picture. 
With G's hands, it shows just how tiny they were...



On Night Two of H and M's little lives, they were in separate bassinets in the the hospital nursery and both girls were apparently screaming.  They couldn't be consoled. They wouldn't settle down.  They changed and fed them.  Nothing helped.  They finally put H in the same bassinet as M and they immediately stopped crying and fell asleep.  Needless to say, they slept in the same bassinet for as long as their little bods would allow. Way cute. 

Because they were so itty bitty, we had to feed them every two hours for quite some time.  Then, we could do every three.  Of course, we had to wake them up during the day, but at night...not so much.  They were happy to wake us up with their wailing.  Of course, I'd feed them during the day and got quite good at feeding them both of them at the same time.  I attempted to breast feed, for literally, 31 seconds and immediately realized that that was not the route for me.  Never looked back on that decision and am proud of it.  [spoken as she steps off of soap box].  G would come home and we'd both feed them at 6 and 9pm.  Then, I'd happily hit the hay and get a good six hours in. G would stay up, watch ESPN with them and such and do the midnight feeding by himself.  I'd do the 3 am by myself and then he'd get up at six and head off to work.  It worked like clockwork.  Until, they moved out of our room and in to their own room...

Actually, that's not fair. They slept fine on their own for a few months.  Actually, that's still not fair.  At four months, M decided to sleep through the night and never looked back.  She was a great sleeper.

... and then ... there. was. H.  Sweet Mother Mary.  I can't begin to tell you the utter sleep deprived woe she caused in our lives.  The child wouldn't, couldn't, didn't sleep through the night.  For nearly 2 years.  I understand that.  Some kids just take longer to figure it all out.  I get that.  And I'm surely not talking about when she was an infant. Of course, as an infant, we did all that we could to be with her and help her.  I'm talking about when she was "old enough to know better". I know that some would say "She was only little.  She needed comfort.  She needed to know that someone was there for her.  She needed...she needed..."  I'll tell you what she needed...to. go. to. sleep.

Now, I tease H.  I tell her that in the middle of night, I'd say to her (in a mostly joking but with a bit of seriousness thrown in), "Choose the red bin or the blue bin.  Which one do you want?"  I was referring to the recycling bins.  I was going to put her in one of them in the middle of the night and see how she slept out there.  I would let her choose which color she preferred.  I wouldn't just randomly throw her the first one I could find!  That wouldn't be nice at all.  Of course, I wasn't serious, but we couldn't take it any more.

And neither could M.  Thankfully, when her Best Sister was in the crib next door screaming at the top of her little lungs, M would, as they say, sleep like a baby.  We were so worried that H would wake her up one too many times and suddenly we'd have two crazy babes on our hands.  That never happened. Every now and again, you'd see M raise her head from her mattress, cock it to the left, look at the Sister and think "Dude, are you effing serious?  Go. To. Sleep.  We get it.  You love Mumma.  You love Daddy.  They'll be here in the morning.  You're seriously pissing me off."  Then, she'd put her head back down and go to sleep until morning.  Thank you, sweet baby girl.

All this while H was sweating, turning bright red with eyes bulging out like they were unattaching from her body.  She wasn't hungry.  She wasn't wet.  She wasn't anything but awake.  For effing hours.

One night, G was out.  M was asleep.  H was screaming like a lunatic.  I couldn't take it anymore.  I left G a note on the counter for when he came home.  It said something like "I have not run away.  I am in the cellar.  So that I cannot hear her scream anymore.  She is fine.  I am not."  He says that he came home, read the note, and found me asleep on the couch in the cellar.  Blanket wrapped around my head (or more accurately my ears) to drown out the sound of the Crazy Child.  

We tried everything.  I read every stinking book.  Nothing worked.  It was madness. I thought we were never going to sleep again. 

And then, just like that, it ended.  And the child who couldn't stand to sleep is now the one who would truly take a nap if offered the chance any day of the week.  She is the child who is so mild mannered (in most regards) and lets things roll off her back like a champ.  She is the child who loves to go to bed early and sleep in late.  Funny how that happens. 

Maybe she's just trying to make up for all the stinkin' sleep she lost in years 0-2.  Who knows?  What I do know is that we love to tease her about it now.  "Do you know how crazy you made us?  Do you have any idea?!?!"  She just laughs because she knows we're kidding (sort of).  And M laughs too.  Because she knows that she was the poster child of a good sleeper. She thinks that she caused us no angst at all...but we have video to prove otherwise.  To be continued ...