License to be Grumpy, Apparently

Last weekend, particularly the time between 7:00 October 22nd and 7:00am October 23rd, marked a new low for Kel, the boys, and me. Our sleep schedule has been the following: ideally Andrew is in bed and alone by 7. Kel sleeps from 7 to 10 (3 hours), then she comes and relieves me so I can sleep from 10 to 4 (6 hours) and then I'm on again so she can get 3 more hours (4-7) before I have to get ready for work. Lately it's been more like 2.5/5/2.5 because Andrew's schedule gets shifted and the transitions between our shifts take a little longer than planned. You have to adapt, right?

I had the great last weekend to try a technique she read about on one of her groups: Mom and Dad wake up together, crank out the routine together in ~half an hour, and everyone goes back to sleep for another 3 hours. Sounds great right? Well, apparently these other twins are older than our 5-week-olds. NO ONE got any sleep at all. I must have forgotten about how noisy these guys are sleeping at night. Always grunting and squirming and talking. They say that sleeping routines emerge around 6 weeks so I guess I should have known better. Also, and we didn't know this until the morning, Wes had a giant (for him) booger in his nose that was making him wheezy all night.

Kel and got... maybe... between us... 3 hours. A new low. Now I know why we have it set up the other way.

Sunday was spent in pajamas watching TV and hanging out with our boys. We got nothing done. No laundry, no dishes. We barely got showers. It's funny, you can tell when Robin's been here because the laundry piles are small, if existent at all. You can tell when Dad's been here because bottles are clean and drying on the racks. We tried our best to recover Sunday but we could only make so much progression. We knew Robin was coming back Monday and we decided to not ask for help and try to get through it ourselves. I think, even with the benefit of hindsight, that this was the right call and gave us some confidence and seasoning after October 22nd, 2011: The Night From Hell, hereafter referred to as TNFH, or Tonfweh Night (inserting O and W for pronunciation assistance for obvious reasons).

This night represented the New Low for us as parents, where we lost all patience with our little boys and had no sympathy for their pains and uncomfortability at all. No abuse went down or anything like that, but we picked them up like so many objects and told them probably a couple of times "will you just shut up already???". Certainly nothing to write home about, but also certainly not the way we want to raise them and model love for them. I think every parent has to have that New Low night for each of their kids when they're forced to acknowledge that their lives are not their own anymore and that these helpless little creatures get a bye for everything they do that pisses you off.

We swore on that night that we would take the high ground, and keep ourselves in check about taking the high ground from that day on. And what that really means is for the rest of their infancy, when its really hard to raise them. I'm sure we will need to have a similar kind of Summit Meeting when they're older and present us with new challenges, but you really gotta take this thing a week at a time. Two years is a very long term promise for us as far as we're concerned.

This morning I had to admit that these guys are pretty cute. It's amazing what a good night's rest and a few games of Starcraft II will do for my mood. On Tuesdays and Thursdays Dad has been coming over at 4 to relieve me of that early morning shift. This has obviously been awesome. He comes and helps Kel with the boys a few mornings a week and decided that the best way to help me was to cover my shift. Last night I got Andrew in bed ~8:30, played some SCII for about a hour (I won my first game and lost the following 3... I've been falling down the ladder like Humpty Dumpty lately... oi), was in bed at 9:30 and slept until around 3. Then I got up for about an hour and a half for my shift. Then slept till 8!