The Sleep War Continues

I guess if you're one of Facebook friends, you can guess what this is about.

I should actually just re-post the blog entry from July 1st right here. It's the same story with just more screaming. At least then, she would at least stop screaming when we got upstairs. Now she just keeps going until we're sitting down with her, and she's actually back in her bed.

We're hoping she's starting to calm down, since last night she only woke up twice -- meaning that the hubby and I actually got more than four hours of sleep in ONE night. I think we may have even possibly achieved six hours, but I'm not really sure.

I'm really starting to understand why I've been so slow to get moving in the mornings lately, why it's so hard to get to the gym. Especially these last two weeks. I don't mind being sleep deprived for a day or two, honestly. And usually when it happens, it's just because I had something that caught my interest and consumed me while I sort of forget that whole am deadline -- namely, when Cutezilla wakes up. But these past few weeks, I'm too tired to do much of anything during the day or night. and when I do end up doing something at night, it's usually just trying to reclaim some time for myself; I almost always pay for it on the back end, when Cutezilla gets up. If I'm lucky, we don't end up yelling at each other because I'm too tired and burnt out to deal with anyone, much less my toddler tyrant, who, while she is very sweet and loving and smart, is also very demanding when it comes to her activities and the necessity of Mommy as company. You know, since no one else is around.

What has been nice, is that some people are coming around to understanding. My babysitter, after spending an evening with Cutezilla in full grump-mode, said upon our arrival back to the house, "Boy, that kid sure has some lungs." Most people don't see her in Mr. Hyde mode. She's cute, she's sweet, and perfectly adorable, a perfect Dr. Jekyll... until you put her in bed. Then it's all on for the All-Night-Scream-A-Thon.

I honestly think this is some sort of separation anxiety. This fight with sleep started back when the hubby had to leave for work for five days. I took her Cuteness down to honor the grandparents with her presence, and instead of passing out cold for my mother in a delightful eight minutes flat, she fought going to bed for almost the entire visit. Two words: NOT FUN. Especially with my dad recovering from surgery, and grumpy as hell, because we were all cooped up in the house due to recovery and rain. Which means he was driving my mother insane, and I ended up playing referee. But at least they weren't hen-pecking ME.

But it's two weeks later, and like clockwork, at 12:45am, the screaming begins. One of us goes up, gets her settled back down, we wait until she's out again, come back downstairs, get all cozy, and then BAM. Round Two begins. Repeat process until dawn. Preferably until fifteen minutes before hubby has to get up to go to work. Or at least that's what the rules seem to be, according to the 'Zilla. And then she gets up an hour or two later, happy and bouncing through the kitchen.

What worries me is that the hubby will be traveling again in a few weeks -- NINE days. I really have no idea what that's going to do to us, if this thing really is separation anxiety. But I guess we'll see.

Okay, So I'm Sure There's A Good Reason

For not blogging. I'm sure it was... um... well... hmm. Er, let's just assume there was and just be happy that I got back around to this, shall we?

Address of The State: nothing much has changed. The summer break with no Mother's Day Out (heretofore known as MDO) went better than expected, and I did not actually lose what's left of my mind. Not that anyone can tell, but hey, I'll call it a success. Cutezilla is doing well, and her vocabulary gets bigger by the day. Including starting to call her daddy by his actual NAME. We were sitting in the bathtub, and I called him to get something for me, and the next thing I know, Cutezilla yells, "KWISS? KWISS!?!" Plain as day. The hubby's response?

"Well that puts her 11 years up on the sass scale."

In other news, I bought a miata. Okay, the hubby bought it FOR me, I guess. Which still works. So I drive it to the grocery store after he gets back from work. You know. The whole quarter mile. We haven't been able to make it to an autocross lately, and I think it's been getting to me. I got a speeding ticket last night, then found out my tags were expired, and that apparently, I hadn't paid my taxes. YIP-FREAKING-EE. So I tore the house apart looking for the paperwork, and yeah, lo and behold, there it was. The upside? I finally went through the mail that's been sitting on the dining room table since [apparently] before June.

We also got the carpets cleaned on Tuesday. Cutezilla broke out into hives at her school so I had to go pick her up -- missing my Zumba class, mostly because, I couldn't in good consciousness drop her off at the nursery there when I didn't know what the hives were going to do. So we got home, and no sooner had we hit the door when I smelled this awful waft of something... and found whatever it was coming from Cutezilla's diaper. I won't go into detail (for once) because I think that you should be able to go to sleep tonight and not have nightmares about it. See what a thoughtful person I am? Suffice it to say that the hubby rented a steam cleaner on his way home from work. The positive here is that the floors actually got vacuumed AND steam-cleaned, which was awesome. And the baseboards finally got dusted. Okay, some of them, but not all. Cutezilla is full-time, okay?

And yeah, I did get sick for a few weeks, too. Stuck in bed while Cutezilla runs rampant is not my favorite way to go with that, but it's what happened. I love it when I go to see the doctors, and they say, "Well... you don't have flu." Great. What if I wanted the flu? What if I wanted, for once to be able to say, "I KNOW WHAT I HAVE!!! I AM ACTUALLY SICK, AND NOT MAKING THIS SH*T UP!!! I HAVE PROOF!"

And yeah, the baby-weight is still here. I had actually lost enough to get my damn engagement ring back on, and then I gained it back. (I visited my parents for a week after my dad had surgery on his shoulder, and we were all cooped up in the house, and I had nothing to do but cook. Can you guess what happened?) But I'm trying to get back to it. Supposedly the MDO days will help, but as it is, I only have 2 hours left today, and I need to do some more writing. Fiction, of course. But the jones for that is bad too, and it's not illegal. Thank God.

So hopefully I'll be able to get back here a little more often and post. Wish me luck.