I got nothin’ right now.

I kind of hate myself for even thinking about writing this post, complete with an artsy nature photo, about how blah and tired I’ve been lately, and how there are a million things I could and should be doing instead of sitting on the couch after the kids are in bed. (The artsy nature photo itself is pretty cool, though; Annalie took it, which makes it that much cooler.) Yet here I am writing it. Bleargh.

Troy’s been working ridiculously long hours for months now and we’re all fraying at the edges because of it. Elliora still isn’t sleeping through the night and the lack of sleep is taking its toll on me and my patience levels. Annalie insists on acting like a seven-year-old (the nerve!). I’m always a few steps behind the mess that’s taking over the house. We could be moving as soon as February but don’t have orders yet so we can’t plan anything past January. I have a mile-long list of crochet projects I need to tackle but hardly any time or desire to crochet. I want to blog—I have so many posts in my head—but I never seem to get any of them actually written. One or both of the cats keep pooping on the floor next to the litter box. There is a new yet old ongoing family drama that is breaking my heart and making me lose sleep when I don’t have any to spare. Blah, blah, blah.

All this stuff is combining lately into a perfect storm that leaves me exhausted and frustrated in its wake. It’s overwhelming, and I tend to go a little numb when I think about it too much. I don’t even want to be writing this post about it except it’s driving me crazy that I can’t write the posts I want to write so I’m writing this one to explain why.

I know a lot of this is because of Troy’s crazy job right now, and more of it is because I have a baby, and that both of those things are temporary. I know that someday I will feel more like myself again, that this too shall pass. But oh, I’ll be annoyed about it until it does.

What’s annoying you right now? Let’s have a b!tch-fest. Those always make me feel better! Misery loves company.

Sleeping face-down on Mom’s crossed legs is SO two days ago. Face-UP is where it’s at.

This afternoon Elliora fell asleep in the car on the way home for a few minutes, which normally doesn’t affect her napping. But today when I brought her inside and nursed her, she didn’t fall asleep like she normally does. She was wide-awake and happy. I mentally shrugged, figuring she’d go to bed a bit early tonight, and we got up to play.

When her slightly-earlier-than-normal bedtime came around, she happily nursed and easily went to sleep, not even making a peep when I put her down in her bed. I went off to meet a friend at Starbucks for some companionable side-by-side laptopping, confident that she’d stay asleep…only to text my mom an hour and a half later and find out that she had awakened ten minutes after I left and had been awake ever since.

So I wasn’t surprised when she had a hard time going to sleep after that. I wasn’t even surprised at how hard she was fighting sleep; Elliora is very strong-willed and has been able to keep herself awake since she was born. What did surprise me was that when she flopped into a position face-up on my crossed legs, she relaxed and immediately went to sleep.

Nothing regarding this kid should surprise me anymore when it comes to sleep, though.

I’ve been gradually cutting down her night-nursing for a couple of months now, working my way up to eight hours without nursing. I did the same thing with Annalie, who was much more interested in nursing than Elliora ever has been, at about the same age. After a couple nights of her waking up and being denied a chance to nurse, Annalie just kinda went, “Oh, I won’t get fed if I wake up? All right then, I’ll just sleep,” and she stopped waking up at night almost entirely. The times she did wake up, it was easy to settle her back down by just patting her on the back and whispering to her.

Elliora, on the other hand, shows no sign of being even close to sleeping for eight hours without waking up, or of being willing to settle back down with just a touch and a reassurance. She does go back to sleep without nursing, so I don’t feel like she’s missing that. It’s more like she just isn’t a big sleeper. Annalie is like me: once we’re asleep, we’re out for the count and it’s hard to wake us up. I think Elliora just might be more like my brother: he has a hard time going to sleep and a hard time staying asleep, waking up more than once most nights. He’s been like that since the day he was born.

Elliora will sleep from bedtime (usually between 7-7:30) till around midnight without waking up about half the time. (The other half of the time, she might wake up once between bedtime and midnight, or she might wake up every hour on the hour. We never know which it will be.) She wakes up almost every night around midnight and usually takes about 10-15 minutes to settle back down with one of us picking her up and cuddling her. Just to keep things interesting, on some nights nothing on God’s green earth will calm her down for an hour or more.

Regardless of when or how often she wakes up, if we don’t pick her up, she will stand up in her crib and screeeeeeeeam and wake Annalie up. If we try to leave her in the bed and just pat her on the back, we have to physically hold her down to keep her from getting up, which makes her scream more, which wakes Annalie up. Annalie, very understandably, gets grouchy when a screaming baby wakes her up from a sound sleep.

The rest of the night is pretty unpredictable. Elliora usually only wakes up once between midnight and 4am, and can be settled back down with 10-15 minutes of cuddling. Or she might wake up every hour and need 10-15 minutes of holding each time, or she might just wake up and be awake for an hour or two.

Elliora has slept entirely through the night, from 8pm to 7am, exactly once in her life, on a night when we hadn’t done anything differently from any other night. So we know she can do it, but we have no idea how to make her do it again.

I would happily let her sleep with us and cuddle all night, but if she’s in bed with me and I won’t nurse her, she gets monumentally annoyed and will scream her annoyance for a long time. She’s also quite strong for her size, and trying to hold onto her when she’s struggling is difficult and exhausting. The times I have stuck it out and let her cry in my arms without giving in and nursing her, she’s screamed for two hours or more. Usually if I nurse her, she’s fine and will go to sleep eventually, but if I nurse her in bed I’ll probably fall asleep, and since she’s learned how to crawl we don’t feel safe leaving her in bed with us all night while we’re sleeping. She’s an explorer and she takes every chance she gets to wander off.

What it all comes down to is that Elliora is incredibly strong-willed. She isn’t a sound sleeper and she isn’t very flexible about her sleeping habits. She’s very good at letting us know how she’s feeling, and when she’s mad she screams about it.

It’s already gotten so much better than it used to be with her, sleep-wise. But there still isn’t much consistency, and that’s both baffling and frustrating at times. We know it won’t be this way forever, and we’ll deal with it like grown-ups and do our best to gently teach her, when she seems ready, how to sleep through the night without the all-night milk bar or on-demand snuggling. But we’ll still be really happy when she’s sleeping through the night consistently.

What about you? Does your kid have a sleeping habit that mystifies you, or drives you crazy? Or do you have one of those mythical kids who sleeps beautifully?

I’m SO close to 10,000 comments on this blog! Will this post be the one that gets the 10,000th comment!? I think it could be…and that 10,000th commenter will win a piece of custom-painted pottery, or something crocheted, or maybe something else entirely. It’s just my way of saying “thank you” for all for the great comments over the past four years. So gimme your two cents, and YOU could be lucky #10,000!

Today has been one of those days. It wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t really good either.

I’m getting over a cold (aren’t I always?), the main symptom of which is an annoying cough.

Since I’m sick, I slept with Elliora during both her naps, which was doubtless good for me but as usual it made the whole day feel off-kilter.

I met a friend to paint pottery this evening, which was fun; but the 7 Days photo I’d planned to take at the studio didn’t happen because although I’d remembered to lug along my fancy camera, I’d forgotten to put the memory card back in it before I left.

(I did take this cameraphone picture of the mug I painted.)

When I got home, I half-heartedly attempted a few self-portraits only to be thwarted by a dead camera battery. So I plugged the battery in and decided I should eat something.

I asked Troy if there were any grapes left, and he said yes, and maybe he’d try one of the Ginger Gold apples we’d bought today.

That’s when it hit me. I knew what I needed to do to save the day. I needed to eat some apples and hummus. And I did, and they were delicious.

The ironic postscript is that when I uploaded the photos I’d taken of my day-saving apples and hummus (Ginger Gold apples go perfectly with hummus), something had corrupted the files. I was able to view the complete images in the preview window, but when I opened them in Photoshop half or more of each photo was missing. And then I couldn’t save the corrupted images. I ended up doing a screencap of the most-complete image, only to find I couldn’t even edit the screencap in Photoshop. So I uploaded to Flickr and used Picnik to edit it. Now I’m adding this to the 7 Days pool just minutes before midnight.

Dedication to 7 Days: I haz it.