Exhaustion and Attachment

It's 6 am. Between Ben and myself, we've been awake pretty much all night. Maybe a couple of moments to doze off before Charlie squeaks, then starts wailing. We've done it all. We've been trying the co-sleeping thing, which has just made everything worse. With every exception we've made to our we'll-never-do-that parenting rules, his demands have grown. At times during the night, it feels like we're negotiating with a terrorist.

I'm just telling you like it is.

Never mind, there he goes again. To be continued....

~shhhh, bounce bounce bounce, rockrockrockrockrockrock~

....and I'm back.

We're to the point where Charlie will gladly sleep in our arms all night long. Unless we try to get comfortable, and which point he usually begins to protest that we stand up and start bouncing him.

When we put him down, he starts frantically hitting his face/wiping his nose/rubbing his eyes, which begins the squeaking to wailing sequence.

All of this from a boy who is smiley, pleasant, friendly, independent, and cheerful all day long.

Time out again.


~shhhh, bounce bounce bounce, rockrockrockrockrockrock.... try to figure out how to blog and hold baby, give up, go to work, come home, eat lunch, shhhh, bounce bounce bounce ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh naptime~

Time in.

Now that daylight washes the world with perspective, I no longer liken my nights to negotiating with a terrorist. But, I'm going to leave that part in this post so you can get a sense of the ugly things that night time does to me.

The bottom line is that Charlie is not sleeping well. Emotionally, I'm fine with the long process of attachment. Emotionally, I don't mind a bit giving up my sleep and my comfort to hold and rock and bounce. But, practically, well.... we all need sleep. Sleeplessness makes you (me) crazy. It wears us thin, leaves us no buffer of time to recuperate and get ready for another day of attachment, much less work and answering a four-year-old's questions.

In my sleep-deprived-insanity, it's hard to differentiate the good thoughts from the crazy. But, here a few I'm going to let take root in my life for a start:

• It is foolish to assume that his happiness means he's attached. He likes me, he likes life, but that is not the same thing as forming a healthy attachment with a caregiver that will be the foundation for a healthy life.
• In light of this, I need to make some changes. No more checking my email while I feed him a bottle. When I'm not scanning the room to assess the safety of the older two, this is eye contact time. I need to wear him more - just because he's happy to play on the floor while I clean up doesn't mean that's what's best for him. We need to go back to not letting others hold him (again, just because he likes it doesn't mean that's what's best for him). And, saddest of all: it might be time to give up the gym for a spell... we'll see. 
• I want to put more work into the attachment thing during the day, in the hopes that it will lessen the need for some of it during the night.
• Maybe a swaddler, this blanket specifically, will help with the frantic nose-wiping, face-hitting, ear-tugging? We'll see, because I'm ordering it right now.

I'm still not sure where I'm at with the crib/co-sleeping dilemma...

Am I making a bit of sense or has the Crazy seeped in to this post?

I am so tired that I cried this morning when someone asked me to move seats during a meeting. I am so tired that I don't even know how I feel about one of the biggest legislative controversies in recent history. I am so tired that when people talk about said controversy I want to cry because everyone seems so mean about it.

I'm just tired. And trying not to hang all my hopes on the Miracle Blanket.