Sleep, or Lack Thereof

If I were the subject of some cruel scientific study on sleep deprivation, someone would have stopped the study by now. I can just see the head of research coming down hard on a sadistic underling for even trying to discover what happens when a human being survives on limited sleep for this long. Even if he didn’t, some radical animal rights group would have surely sprung me by now.

Sadly I’m not in a scientific experiment, and no one from the Earth Liberation Front is coming to set me loose in the wild, though if any activists wanted to take an overnight shift I’d probably let them. I’m caring for twin newborns who don’t seem to sleep nearly as much as they should, and a toddler who limits my nap possibilities.

I think the lack of sleep is starting to build. I’m having trouble remembering things. My throat is sore. I’m having trouble remembering things. I’m blinking a lot. Last night was a little worse than usual, but not too atypical.

After feeding the twins and shutting down the house for the night, I stumbled into bed shortly after 11pm. Much like a toddler who skipped his nap though, I was too tired to fall asleep at first before finally drifting off around midnight. Shortly after 1am, I woke to hear Ian complaining furiously. I shuffled to their crib, gave him his pacifier, waited a minute for him to fall back asleep, and returned to my bed. An hour later, I awoke to hear both crying. I fed them, burped them, changed them, and set them back down before returning to bed around 3am.

By 5:30 they were awake again. 5:30 is a no man’s land of feeding; their wake time of 7am is too close to feed them, but it’s too far away to let them go. I gave them their pacifiers and camped out on the couch by their crib. If they were going to wake up angry, I’d feed them; if I could limp them along for 90 minutes, I would.

I managed to coax them into waiting. They spent most of the 90 minutes complaining in their half-asleep state, but they made it with me rising from the couch half-a-dozen times to return somebody’s pacifier.

So that means I slept for five-ish hours last night. Throw in an hour nap in the afternoon, and I’m doing passably as long as you don’t consider that I’m not sleeping longer than three hours at a time anymore. It doesn’t seem so bad until I think about. Sometimes when I catch the dog napping, I’ll poke her just to wake her up; if I can’t sleep, she can’t either. Maybe I’ll draw the ire of an animal rights activist. Maybe they’ll watch the kids for me for a little while so I can sleep.