Remind me again why I signed up for this?

That is what was going through my mind in the wee hours of the morning.  You can probably guess that I was up with Paxton (yet again), but here's the background info.

*WARNING: Whine ahead.  Please bring your own cheese.*

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a morning person.  And anything between when I go to sleep at night and when I wake up of my own free will (waking up to an alarm clock, crying baby, barking dog, etc. does not count) qualifies as morning.  I have a very short temper at these times and no one is safe.  That brings us to our current subject.

Paxton has been doing experiments on the effects of sleep deprivation lately and I am his unwilling subject.  Now I know that I was the one who wanted to have a baby, and I knew that a certain amount of sleep deprivation was part of the package.  However, I also spent the first 2 1/2 months of Paxton's life letting him "cry it out" so that he would learn to sleep through the night.  This is why I am completely baffled as to why he is suddenly having bouts of insomnia at 11 months old!  You would think that with only one nap a day he would be tired enough to sleep through the night, right? (ha ha that rhymes)  But alas, this is not always the case.  I read this blog a few weeks ago and found myself thinking, "I know exactly how you feel!  That's not how Paxton is when he goes to sleep, but I stop loving being a Mom after I put him to sleep for the night."  It's not that I don't love Paxton or that I regret having him or anything like that; I would do anything for him, like using my body as a shield to protect him from a bullet, car, or other projectile (this scenario hasn't occured yet but I'm fairly certain I would do it), cleaning up bodily fluids, being smacked in the face with various objects, or getting up multiple times during the night, but I'm pretty sure there's no "Mom Law" that says I have to like it!

Paxton had his first cold a few weeks ago and had a really bad night. However, we got him a humidifier the next day and he went back to sleeping through the night. This week has been a completely different story. Monday night he was up for a bottle at 11:30 pm and then again at 2 am, then wanted to get up for the day at 6 am. I said, "How 'bout no?" and put him back in his crib while I went back to bed and passed out (so I'm not sure if he went back to sleep or just played with his stuffed animals for the extra hour I was able to squeeze in).  Tuesday night Paxton was up at 12:30 am and we did the diaper change, bottle and cuddle routine, but this time he decided that he was ready to be awake and didn't want to go back to sleep. So at 1 am I put him back in his crib even though he was still awake and he proceeded to cry for an hour! (not normal crying either; he'd stop for a minute or two every so often so that I could just start to doze off and then he'd start crying again so I'd wake up)  And then he wanted to be up at 6 am again. (see above for my response to that notion) Then last night, Paxton was up at12:15 am. We did the whole song and dance again and I ended up putting him in his crib again while he was still awake around 12:45 am. He then proceed to cry for half an hour until I gave in and went to cuddle him again.  However, I was NOT happy about the situation and slammed his bedroom door as I entered (yes I was having a tantrum and I woke Jay up which made me feel even worse since he had to be up for work 2 hours later).  After explaining to Paxton in no uncertain terms that I was completely unimpressed with his sleep deprivation experiments he settled right down and went to sleep (I'm beginning to think that he might be like *Bill Cosby's children and he can't sleep some nights unless I get angry about my need for sleep and how he is disrupting it) until 6 am when he thought we should be up for the day again .  Not happening.  I can get up at 6 am if I get to sleep through the whole night, but not when I'm up 2 or 3 times and have to listen to Paxton crying for extended periods of time.

It's not just the fact that Paxton wakes me up during the night.  I can usually deal with the diaper change, bottle, cuddle thing since it's about a 15 minute thing and then we both go back to sleepand I've figured out how to do it while semi-conscious.  However, it's the nights when Paxton takes longer to drink his bottle, or he just wants to be held, or he inexplicably has a poopy diaper in the night so I have to turn on the light which brings us both into a state of full consciousness that are the problem.  If I'm up for more than 15 minutes my brain thinks it's time to be awake and starts thinking and pondering because really, what else could I possibly want to be doing in the middle of the night than worrying about finances, right?  This is a problem because it guarantees that I will be awake for at least an hour.  So then if Paxton wakes up 2 or 3 hours later, I will have only been asleep for 1 or 2 hours, and a night's sleep comprised of 4-6 hours of broken sleep does not a happy Alisha make.  I am so not looking forward to going back to work.  I'm not sure how I'm going to function with a schedule that includes an 8 hour work day if Paxton is doing this to me when I can barely function now without a schedule!

* p.s. if you've never seen "Bill Cosby: Himself" you should definitely look it up.  I have a whole new appreciation for it now that I'm a parent!