DPDF Series: Red Eyes, Dark Circles, Dull Brain = Zombie Mum

Yup!  It’s NOT always fun ‘n games as I sometimes like to think it is.  (Well, who said fantasising is bad??)

At some point I had this sleep thing down.  Almost 2 years ago, when the boys had turned 1, I employed the assistance of a sleep training clinic to help me sleep… ummmm…. indirectly.  I hired them to ‘teach’ me how to train my babies to sleep through the night.  3 days… and I had it figured out and I had 2 sleeping beauties – well 4, as we finally could sleep a good 6-8 hours at a stretch!  What a novelty that was.

As they say with children, or life in general, ‘it’s just a phase‘, ‘this too shall pass‘.  Well… this ‘phase‘ we are currently in has been way tooooo long and it is NOT passing! A hasn’t slept through the night in about 10 months – yes – okay- once a week we get a reprieve.  But my star sleeper Y was just amazing… head down, good night, and all smiles at 6:30a.m.  Not any more unfortunately, since he had a throat infection over a month ago, he has taken to sleeping ‘on’ me.  That’s all lovely and sweet and I would do that any time, but now, 5 weeks later, he’s still restless at night, and wants ‘only mama’.  This too I can handle, but not when there’s 2 waking up a 30 mins pattern after each other for a stretch of 2 hours and somehow there’s 4 of us in our bed, and they both still want ‘only mama’.

There are nights I get them to sleep back in their beds, but that’s as long as I sleep on the duvet on the floor in between their beds! Y sometimes is so compassionate at night, he comes and sleeps with me on the floor and says, ‘mama, I share my blanket with you’.  Awwww…. love you baby, but my legs are way longer than yours and somehow your blanket isn’t that long. Then in the 1 meter space between the beds, A decides he too needs to sleep with mama, and we’re all sandwiched together … Yes I know it’s sweet, and I know these days will never come back….:) 🙁 but for now, I’m a Zombie Mum.

When will this too pass?  Is it a ‘phase’? Will I be moaning in a few years that my boys won’t sleep with me anymore?

 

Where do I begin?

2 Years and 10 Months, that’s how old A & Y are today.

2 Years and 10 Months of bewilderment, being overwhelmed, feeling a new kind of love – on the double, and just being in pure rapture watching 2 little boys I gave birth to at the same time (ok, well 15 minutes apart) being so so different from each other.

A & Y came 6 weeks early, and 2 weeks earlier than I realistically expected.  Twins can come anywhere from 28 weeks on to full-term, but I anticipated mine around 36 weeks and not 33.5.  So for the 1st 2 weeks they were in the hospital in incubators and then just under observation as by God’s Grace they were healthy and were not machine dependent.  The best healing for premies is to give them ‘kangaroo care’.  Wow!  What an amazing experience to hold two little munchkins to my chest at the same time and just listen to each one take their breath.

Watching them and already seeing how different they were was bewildering.  I could already see how different their features were from each other, how they positioned themselves while sleeping, how the tones of their little cry were different.  I can only imagine that it’s overwhelming to say the least when you’re holding your first born and you already start to dream in to their future.  Holding 2?  Wow.

Needles to say the journey has been loads of fun (ok it has been, AND challenging!) so far.  I will let you in to snippets as I recollect the fun and crazy times leading up to now.

My posts will be going back in to the past sometimes and then back in the present.  Enjoy the ride.