Sleep baby, sleep

The Girl turned 10 months yesterday and this is what I realized: I haven’t had a full night’s sleep (and by that I mean that I haven’t slept for at least 7 hours straight) since December 2007. That’s almost three years, and you may well be wondering why. The fact of the matter is that I stopped sleeping in December of 2007 cause I was in my third trimester and had to get up and pee every thirty minutes (though why I didn’t think of just sleeping in diapers is completely beyond me), in February 2008 The Boy was born. The Boy enjoyed two night feedings (at midnight and 5am) until he was almost a year old (do I look like I’m joking??) and then he moved on to just one night feeding at 5am, until he was 19months old. At this point The Boy started sleeping from 8pm to 8am with no interruptions. Heaven? Of course, for The Husband… I had already started waking every thirty minutes to pee at night cause I was pregnant and in the third trimester once again. In retrospect, the whole getting pregnant when The Boy turned one, was obviously a decision made by two people who’s judgment was severely impaired due to lack of sleep.

 Having come to this realization has helped me come to terms with several things, for example: I can’t get anything done, I do all the immediate, urgent, needs to get done right this minute or not at all stuff, but walk around the house and you’ll see piles and piles of black holes as The Husband calls them. Black holes are piles of all the crap you need to get done, but don’t, like filing the bills away, there’s a pile of bills on my desk starting from November 2009, that’s almost a year’s worth of paper I need to file, or in my closet I have a pile of shirts and pants missing buttons that I need to sew on, I think that black hole started in the mid nineties, or in the kitchen, a black hole of coupons, yoga class flyers, recipes and just random crap that needs to be dealt with, but I can’t get anything done. The reason for this, I believe, is that my brain is using 90% of its capacity with actions like stay alert, breathe in and then out, where’s The Girl? Keep her out of harm’s way, deal with The Boy’s tantrum, feed them, clothe them, love them and then also breathe in, out, in... The remaining 10% is desperately trying to keep me from lying down on any horizontal surface that I may run into at any given time. Or that’s what it probably used to do, now I’m at the point where I couldn’t even sleep if I wanted to. We had three marvelously blissful days in which both kids slept soundly and quietly all night long, I kept waking up to make sure they were still there and hadn’t been kidnapped in the night. So the situation now is, The Boy occasionally talks or walks in his sleep, and will sometimes wake up and call for us in the middle of the night, but this only happens about once a week, so it’s totally manageable. The girl wakes up once or twice at random times during the night and wants to nurse. At this point I am soooo tempted to just let her cry it out and see if we can’t break this habit seeing as if she behaves like her brother I’ll still be feeding her at night a year from now and that thought makes me want to catapult myself into the void. On the other had I know that if I do let her cry it out there’s two very real possibilities I’m going to have to deal with: 1) that her brother wakes up from all the screaming and starts screaming himself and then no one will get to sleep and 2) that I start suffering from guilt induced insomnia for leaving her to cry on her own all night and I’ll never sleep again. Any suggestions??