tired

So you know I am tired because it says so in the title of this blog.
Before I had the boys, I thought I knew what it meant to be tired.
I thought it meant,"Oh, boy, I'm yawning. I need to get in bed."
Before children, I had a heavenly sleep life.
Pre-baby, I was fresh and dewy eyed
and regularly achieved 8 hours of consecutive sleep.
The real mind-numbing tiredness set in during that last trimester
of pregnancy, with the leg cramps that would jolt me awake,
the near suffocation of the 137 pillows
I had stuffed around my body to keep me comfortable and of course,
the 14 potty breaks I had to take through out the night.
Some people used to tell me,"That is your body getting you prepared
for waking up all through out the night to feed the baby."
I always disliked those people.
What my body should have done was let me bank extra hours of sleep,
for all the sleep I would be missing out on.
With Jack, I was tired when I woke up to feed him, but it was all so
new, such a novelty, I got a little excited to see his sweet face
in the night. He would usually go right back to sleep after his feed.
Bless him.
With Will, he would sometimes have gas. Oh the infernal gas.
So I would be up for hours in the middle of the night.
We would cry together. That was when the fear set in.
The fear of Jack waking up early and my getting 3 hours of sleep total.
I thought maybe I would lose my mind, tsgs, yes, I did.
The only thing that saved me was afternoon naps.
We would all go down for a nap and
the world would right itself for a few hours.
Then when Addison arrived, all chaos broke loose in the realm of sleep.
Because Jack was no longer taking naps.
So even if I managed to get Will and Addison down for a nap,
Jack was still up so I had to be up.
Now "up" is a relative word. I believe I survived Addie's first year
in a somewhat zombie like state. I couldn't properly form sentences.
Sometimes I forgot who Scott was. Sometimes I forgot to shower.
For days.
You know that phrase, "You don't know what you've got till it's gone."
Oh, how I miss going to sleep and waking up IN THE MORNING.
I get angry inside when the children wake up in the night even now.
I want to say, "I don't care if you had a bad dream about eyeballs.
Stay in your bed and work it out."
The odds for having a full night of sleep with 3 children, ages 6
and under are not good, tsgs.
Someone is invetably going to wet through their pjs (Addie - lousy diaper),
have a bad dream, (Will - eyeballs)
sleep walk, (Jack - likes to tour the house)
come crawl in bed with us, (Jack or Will or both)
or cry (me - when any of the above happens.)
It seems like a full night of sleep is a pipe dream.
I now know that some sleep deprived mom came up the phrase
"eternal rest" when thinking about the end of this life.
Because an uninterrupted night of sleep,
by any mom's definition, is heaven.