Missing Sleep

Being a full-time mommy and a full-time employee is hard. Breast-feeding makes it especially hard. Even if Russ conspires to let me sleep in and wakes up early to make a bottle so baby doesn't wake you up, I still wake up because the absolute maximum time I can go between feedings is 8 hours, and that's only if the baby ate especially well right before he went to sleep. Better to just wake up the baby, feed him myself and hope he goes back to sleep so I can. But by the time the baby's done feeding I'm wide awake and hungry, and I've got so much crap to do I can't go back to sleep... I figure I'll take a nap later in the afternoon. And of course, one thing or another conspires to ensure that almost never happens. I figure of two or three hours of sleep I'm losing each night, I manage to make up for maybe three of them on the weekends.

Juggling work and the baby himself isn't a problem. He naps a lot during the early part of the day, and otherwise has enough toys to amuse himself or is content to sit on my lap and watch the screen on the computer. I'll just run music and sing to him and play with his little toes while I'm waiting for scripts to run, and I try to time my conference calls to when he's either napping, or eating. But the lack of sleep means I'm having trouble concentrating by 5 and I'll frequently start to drift off to sleep any time I sit still for more than 5 minutes by 7. Of course, other than feeding the baby, I don't get much time to sit still after 7 - we still haven't had dinner yet, and I frequently end up sacrificing my lunch break to floor time with the kiddo, so I'm starving by 7. The baby doesn't normally go to sleep until 11 - although we start trying by 9 - so there's a couple of hours before I can go to bed and I'm like the walking dead I'm so tired. I've drifted off to sleep sitting upright on the couch while I'm trying to get Roy to go to sleep, only to wake up at 2 in the morning because Roy wakes up again. The other night, Roy kept waking up, and by the time I finally got him down to sleep, I crawled into bed only to have the alarm go off 5 minutes later.

His one year birthday is going to be a much bigger day for me than it is for him, because I'll finally get to wean him. But despite all the whining about wanting sleep, I am getting this in exchange, so it's totally worth it: