Sleep

There just isn’t enough sleep in my weeks. Calfgrit3 has been waking up before 6:00 each morning for about two weeks, now. At first he was getting up at 5:50 to 5:55 — just close enough to 6:00 to not try to put him back down. But each morning he’s gotten up just a few minutes earlier, until yesterday morning, he got up at 5:20. This is maddening.

When he gets up too early, like before 5:50, we’ve tried to put him back in his bed, but he knows how to blackmail us. He knows we don’t want him waking up Calfgrit7, so he has a fit and cries loudly. That’s hard to handle in the 5:00 hour in the morning. We don’t want to give in to the blackmail, but we also want Calfgrit7 to get enough sleep (and we’d like more sleep, too).

If we put him to bed later in the evenings, he wakes up earlier in the mornings. That makes no sense to me at all, but that’s how it works. We’ve tried making sure he gets plenty of physical activity so he’s really tired at night, but that hasn’t helped. He’s not hungry when he wakes up, he’s not wet, he’s just a natural early riser. God help us.

By the time we get the boys in bed around 7:00 each night, Cowgrit and I are so tired we pretty much want to go right to bed, ourselves. It’s hard to get any work done in the evenings when the day started 14 hours ago. And then when I do stay up to get work (writing) done, and I get to bed at 10 or 11:00, or later, 5:00 the next morning is just so brutally early.

I want to sleep for 24 hours straight. I’m willing to give up a full day of activity to just be able to catch up on sleep, and maybe build up a surplus.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com