sleep deprived

For the past couple of weeks I've been struggling, more than usual, with lack of sleep.  My youngest of just over 8 months seems to have become even more nocturnal, plunging new depths in the lack of sleep contest.  I worked it out today, it's been 14 mnths since I last went to bed and woke up in the morning without interruption.  Something I would have deemed impossible before his  arrival.  I've always resisted going to sleep, ahh and that might well be where he gets it from I hear you say...yet once in bed I've relished the lovely position of being warm, snug and ever so comfy with no where to go but exactly right their for several hours...I used to say I was a ten hour a night kind of girl.when it came to sleep..anything less and I felt truly sleep deprived...oh how I envy that person now....in trying, and failing to make sense of his night time wakings I've noticed that the things I attribute his lack of sleep to seem to have three common threads; he's going through a growth spurt, he's teething or the third more frequently utilised.. I just don't know...maybe he's cold...the outside road noise or maybe my husbands snoring...none of which seems to help in the what to do when he wakes, as he's just done, with continuous crying and yet doesn't really want a feed...I mention this not as a poor me but more as a general description of what life is currently like.  The battle for sleep over the worry of trying to work out why the little man is waking.   Every fibre of my body is crying out for just a little more z time yet the smallest of the family is having none of it...when I eventually give in and head for his cot it's to find him sitting up, yes the most recent developmental stage has now occurred, and the little boy wide awake and mostly just wanting to play, blow raspberries and smile, alot.. a disarming approach I have to give him and yet one that I wish he would deploy a little less frequently.  I take solace in telling myself that this is just a stage and won't last for ever....though really on a day to day basis internally I'm just silently willing him to fall back to sleep unaided...last night my husband took the major role in settling him..getting out to his crying and plugging him back to sleep with his dummy...this all occurring with me wide awake but at least still in bed.  I then had the enviable position of watching my husband literally fall back to bed and immediately start snoring with gusto.  Enviable because not only do I find it almost impossible to go back to sleep when woken by the little man but I then have to compete with any and all noises going on, including said snoring.  I've even taken to wrapping my pillow around my head in an attempt to block out all and any residual noise...which to a lesser or greater degree works, at least enough for me to fall back into a limbo of sleep until the next wake up call, usually within the following hour and a half...and yes I've read the books on sleep training etc, none of which actually equip you for your small one crying their hearts out.  My usual stance is to give in, with a mixture of feeling like a failure in the sleep training technique and wanting to comfort the smallest of the brood so he can feel loved enough to go back to sleep. Ideally not waking in the first place.

Lack of sleep or not, I had been given as a gift for my birthday an amount of money from a lovely dear friend to go out and enjoy a 'date night' with my husband.  Going out, as you might imagine has not been something that we've done much of in recent months.  So I found myself looking forward to our night out with a mixture of excitement and anticipation.  We had talked about what we would do, booked the baby sitter and the day finally came round last week.  A night that was to involve going to the movies, the last film I saw at the cinema was Sex in the City 1, I can't even recall just how long ago that was...any way...we had also planned to go for a meal, probably a curry and then maybe if we were still awake, a drink.  I'm not sure if I was excited merely at the thought of doing self centred grown up things, or by the delight of heading to the cinema to see a film or the thought of maybe drinking a few drinks in somewhere other than the back garden or living room by the fire..either way I was, without doubt excited about the event....I had looked up what films were showing in our nearest cinema and chosen, I have to admit an unadulterated Rom Com...about two people who end up being left in charge as god parents of a baby.  I had watched the trailers and even laughed out loud at the various scenarios they had posted to pre-view the movie...this was a film I could identify with and would have the right levels of love and romance, comedy and laughs...to his credit my husband had managed to muster up the right level of 'ooh yes this is a movie I'd like to see too' noises that let me off the hook of feeling guilty about the rom com choice in the first place.  So having negotiated bed time with small one and waved goodbye to the baby sitter we arrive at the cinema only to discover that the one film I wanted to watch above all others...is not on that night...any other night would have been a yes..but for some reason known only to the local cinema house...not on a Thursday!  Now I have to admit that at this point I did take on the behaviour of a very pre-pubescent teenager...I did literally throw my toys out of the pram..  My choice left to me was a couple of dodgy horror movies, one in 3D?! a cartoon and a movie about Facebook...which ordinarily I might have been interested in seeing but not on the first night out in over a year and most definitely Not on the first time at a cinema in several years...After a rather fraught ten minutes I finally agreed to watch Social Network..which, had I not been in the foulest of moods for at least three quarters of, would have been an OK movie....as a general reflection of my mood it wasn't until the last fifteen minutes of the movie that I turned to my husband and asked if the second lead character wasn't being played by Justin Timberlake.  A question my lovely husband found both amusing, endearing and down right unbelievable.  The remainder of the evening had troughs and peaks and, as  hindsight is a wonderful thing. probably could have ended an awful lot earlier. One mediocre curry and one drunken lock in later and the evening got filed as a could a should a...oh bugger it...kind of night.  Is expectation a thing to be avoided or should I just have taken more care in the planning stage?.. I still don't know and truth be told I still feel a little miffed in not seeing the film I wanted.  Then again, I now have a reason to sort another baby sitter out and attempt a second go at the movies.

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