Ode to Sleep

"Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."

I'd like to kick, squarely in the teeth, the author of this proverb. But that's only because I'm slightly delirious due to lack of sleep. For the past several weeks we in the Louwerse household have been living the exact opposite. Which goes something like this:

"Late to sleep, frequently woken, makes one ill, useless, and short-spoken."

Yes. Well. Like I said, I'm tired.

Our sleep woes have stemmed primarily from sickness. Ben and Grayson have been nursing colds for the past two weeks, though they seem to be well now. James suffered from it somewhere in there, and Jeran caught it a couple of days ago. Unfortunately, for him it led to a fit of vomiting for about 7 hours Thursday night. Not fun. All of us feeling run down and not getting enough sleep effectively put an end to our plans to head to Michigan this weekend. Sniff. But I'll admit it has been exactly what we needed just to do absolutely nothing and REST. As much as you do such a thing with three boys under the age of 5 around.

Even without sickness, sleep has been pretty scarce for us. For one thing Grayson has still been waking up once a night, and yes, I know, I need to just grow a spine and cut him off. Maybe something about him being the last baby is making me wuss out, I don't know. Possibility #2: Maybe my sanity can handle him waking up, eating for 10 minutes, and going right back to sleep but not "crying it out" for an hour and a half.

The other thing is that Jeran still consistently wakes up several times a night, crying, inconsolable, not even awake. It is equal parts heartbreaking and maddening. We can't figure out what's causing it or, more importantly, how to fix it.

Baby Graybie had his 9 month check up yesterday, and we discovered, to quote my hubby, that he is a "hot mess". Double ear infection (love when I don't catch those), eczema, and he has dropped significantly in the weight percentile. Enough so that they tested his hemoglobin to see whether he's not getting enough iron. Real nice. Feeling like the mom of the year. But we now have him on some amoxicillan and steroid cream (hopefully we don't wake up to a nine-month-old with a deep voice and chest hair tomorrow).

So what else is going on in our life besides illness and not sleeping?

Well, there's the whole Ben is a hoarder situation. Yes, I've said it. If there was a support group on such things I would go. "Hello, my name is Julie, and I'm the mother of a hoarder." He's pretty hilarious actually. He'll gather up as many things as he can possibly carry (more things than he can, really) and walk around the house with them. And any activity he wants to take part in has to include his "treasures". But, man, does that kid get pissed if he drops something. He's been a tad OCD lately, needing things to be "just so". It's so interesting to see their personalities emerge. And by interesting I mean...exhausting. Speaking of which, I think I'll go catch an hour or so of shut-eye before the nighttime circus commences.