No sleep

My children hate to sleep. 95% of the reason why I am so exhausted is that I haven't slept through the night in a very long time. The other 5% is that I am pregnant and breastfeeding. The number one thing I am nervous about with the new baby coming is my sleep.

Salem used to be a good sleeper. She seemed programmed to sleep a lot at night almost ever since she was born, and even better after she was a couple of months old. She wanted to sleep in until about 9 every morning. Unfortunately, Adora would wake up at about 7 and come into our room, and Salem would wake up. That wasn't that big of a deal in retrospect, at least compared to what we have gone through since then. The really big deal came when we moved. Being homeless for over three months, moving from place to place, sharing rooms with multiple people, etc. really killed her sleep habits. She started waking up several times at night and refusing to go back to sleep without being nursed. For the sake of the other people in the room, I had to give in and do that. Then, once we got to Minot, she just started waking up earlier and earlier. She now permanently shares a room with Salem. That's what living in an essentially 2-BR house will get you. It is impossible to sleep train her without waking up Adora. We have tried to put Adora in our room, but our walls are not insulated, we don't even have closet doors, and our room is RIGHT NEXT to Adora and Salem's. Salem now wakes up between 4:30 and 5:30 each morning and sometimes dozes for a little while before Adora wakes up around 6:30. Sometimes. We do keep wanting to try to sleep train again, putting Adora on the floor in our room for a week or so, but Salem has basically been sick and/or teething for the past 2 months, so we haven't even had a chance to do that.

Daylight savings time was a couple of days ago, right? I usually start prepping the kids about a week in advance to adjust to the time change. I will change their sleep times and mealtimes 10 minutes a day or so until they are more easily adjusted to the new time. It totally snuck up on me this time, though. I really thought it was the following weekend! So we had 0 days of prepping them to adjust to the new time. The silver lining in this was that we assumed that Salem would sleep 'til maybe 6:30 or so. She had been waking up at 5:30, so 6:30 seemed natural. Salem is apparently smarter than Daylight Savings, though. She had it all figured out. She woke up at 5:00 Sunday morning. That's right, 4:00 "real" time.

Thank goodness that I have a wonderful husband who, about 86% of the time, gets up with Salem when she wakes up in the morning, takes her to the couch to lay with her (because we have no other bed set up), and deals with her until Adora wakes up, sometimes even longer. Unfortunately, I still get woken up when she wakes up and sometimes can't go back to sleep because she is so noisy in the living room with him. Even when I can go back to sleep, I frequently wake up multiple times from her noises.

Tonight, she went to sleep at 7:10 and has woken up twice since then. It's 9:30. I had to put Adora to sleep in my bed because Salem was awake, and neither of them would've been able to go to sleep in the room together. Sometimes I feel like I am going to be one of those tortured people who dies from lack of sleep. What a horrible way to go.