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Previous journal entries:

6/15/2002: Father's Day and Junior Policemen
5/8/2002: Time Insanity
4/9/2002: Good Friends and a Weekend Getaway
1/30/2002: Runaway Day
1/19/2002: Ready to walk
12/16/2001: Ornaments
12/6/2001: Galpals
9/25/2001: Flags
9/7/2001: BabyBabyBaby
8/9/2001: Moving
6/25/2001: Sleeping through the night
6/21/2001: Why Website?

I think I'm hooked on Excedrin.

Daytime extra strength Excedrin keeps me awake and functioning in the early morning; Excedrin PM gets me to sleep at night. Although you'd think that with the level of exhaustion I work with it'd be no problem to sleep. I end up lying there awake but exhausted, feeling like I can't afford to lie there awake at four in the morning wishing to be asleep while my all-too-few sleep hours dwindle away. What's wrong with this picture?

Busy busy busy toddlers fill my days. They're so active during the hours when they're awake it boggles my mind. What happens to us as we get older that we lose all that energy? Or at least I did, I shouldn't speak for the rest of you out there. I know of several twin moms out there who rival Casey and Riley for their energy levels. Needless to say I gawp with astonishment and envy as they buzz about accomplishing many things. Nothing seems to daunt them and they are kind and intelligent people, and good moms to boot. Amazing. I want that magic pill that would make me as effective. Somehow I suspect Excedrin isn't quite it.

We've started a new routine for naps and bedtimes after the boys started shifting their sleep schedules around too much for us to handle anymore. (And anyone who knows us already knows just how hard their sleep patterns already were for us!) Anyone who's raising a baby these days has run into the hot topic of whether to let your kids "scream-it-out" or not to get them on a regular sleep schedule. Well, some people have no problem at all and never go through this dilemma, but it's been real hell for us. One of the big problems is of course is that there are two of them and they outnumber us. I suspect they'd outnumber us even if there was only one of them, but that's another story. It's been a struggle from the beginning to try to get them to sleep through the night, but they finally, finally are. And ironically, it's not because of anything we've tried or done, I think they were just ready.

So now we're trying to enforce an easier routine (at least for us, the parents) for getting them to bed. It's slowly working, though there's been some crying involved, which always makes me feel awful. My inability to let them "cry it out" has been the source of some of the most horrible fights Paul and I have ever had; and also the reason for a lot of the sleep deprivation we've gone through over the last year and a half or so, as I _refused_ to give in to all the pressure to let them "cry it out" and let them sob for extended periods. Of course with twins there's already some crying involved, as one frequently has to wait while the other gets attention, but I have been unable to just let them cry when I could actually comfort them and fix the problem, whatever it might be. I simply cannot believe that there is anything wrong with comforting an upset baby.

I've honestly tried almost everything I could think of, read up (well, okay, skimmed; who has time to read??) on all the current methods out there for getting your kids to be perfect little angels and sleep uninterrupted for 10 hours straight. Let me tell you most of it seems to be bullshit; they're almost all variations on the theme of, you guessed it: crying themselves to sleep. And (at the risk of offending some people) it seems like 90% of those books are written by men, some of whom are sleep experts and researchers. Well, they may be sleep experts but any parent (with or without a college degree) can tell you that there's a humongous difference between conducting research under controlled limited conditions and dealing with raising your own children. Maybe it's my own bigotry at work, but it seems likely to me that those guys' wives (or, if roles are reversed, the dads) are the ones at home getting the kids to sleep while the big shot experts are off at the office and lab running sleep experiments. Screw the researchers; I want to talk to the _real_ experts: those moms.

Okay, so I'm ranting. I guess I need to vent a bit. I'm sick of being told that _everyone_ resorts to letting them cry it out; I'm fed up with being told I'm spoiling them or doing them a disservice by the way I've been lax in imposing a sleeping shedule. I feel like a mama tiger ready to rip anything or anyone to shreds if they come near my cubs. Well, maybe that's extreme. Maybe not.

I'm not in the camp of sharing one big communal bed, as I like to actually sleep in my bed, and I seem physically unable to let them cry it out (besides the fact that I think it's cruel and barbaric). So where does that leave me? At the moment, with one boy asleep in his crib and the other whimpering to himself in the other as he refuses to let go and take a nap. I figure if he doesn't go to sleep in the next 5 minutes I'll go in there and do some comforting. But I wish the whole thing were easier. And I'm going to miss rocking them to sleep like I used to do when they were smaller. It took a long time to rock both of them and get them down for the night, but what a happy satisfying thing, to be rocking a contented sleepy baby. Sigh.

Hey, hey, Riley fell asleep, so now they're both down!!! Ooh, ohh, wait, I could go and accomplish great things in the hour or so I have here!! I could do laundry, work on the art for the Moms of Twins' Convention I promised to do, or try to clean up the guest bedroom for Allison, or answer some of my woefully behind e-mail, or return a few of the calls that I'm so behind on, or pay the bills, or work on cleaning up the back yard, or work on the garage cleanup, or try to catch up some on Tom and Dave's poor neglected web site, not to mention the Puzzlebox site or my own site, or babyproof some more in here, or work on my neglected kids' book illustrations, or !!get a shower!! or even... sigh... lay down for a few blessed minutes... Ah, where to start?