I love animals. I always have. When I was 7 we got a cat. When I was 12 I got my own dog (with permission from only one parent – yeah, that didn’t go over well). It was like I was born knowing that I had to have them in my life. Which is why we ended up with two dogs and two cats. I always swore that nothing would make them less important to me… but sadly infertility treatments, pregnancy, and a baby have all served to cut my patience in half and I find they irritate me more than not nowadays. I know it will probably pass, but it does make me sad to realize that I just don’t have the mental space for them anymore. I love them, but I don’t necessarily want to spend all my free time dealing with them – which is kind of what happens. If Kate’s not in our arms then we get a cat crawling up into our face, a dog barking for attention, and someone banging on the water bowl that is empty. It’s exhausting, and a little bit frustrating. I am definitely re-thinking my sanity in having four pets at the same time.<\/p>\n
Normally it’s just mildly irritating, but there are times when I want to drop-kick someone. Like last night, when Zeeke barked just after Kate and I had drifted off. And it wasn’t the “grrrr-woof” that they sometimes make. No, this was a full out german shepherd “BARK BARK BARK!!!!!!!” Piercing. Loud.<\/em> And it woke Kate up.<\/p>\n Now for naps if something goes wrong with the going-to-sleep attempt I just get her up and wait until she gets sleepy again, usually in about 15 minutes. But if it happens when we go to bed for the night? All HELL breaks loose. It was the moving-to-cosleeper-mistake all over again. She was wide awake, refusing to nurse, didn’t want to lay down. I tried for 20 minutes to get her to drift off again, but she fought me. So we switched tactics and Den sat her in the exersaucer to play until she got tired. Which sounds<\/i> like a good idea, wounds like it would work. Instead when she got tired she had the meltdown of meltdowns, screaming like banshees were stealing her soul, and nothing we did could get her to stop. We walked her, rocked her, shushed her, attempted to nurse her… she kept on screaming. It was like something snapped in her poor tired brain and all she could see was Overtired – Alert! System meltdown in progress!<\/i> I put her in the mei tai and walked her around and thankfully that, for whatever reason, got through to her and she passed out on me. I slowly unwrapped her and layed down with her to sleep.<\/p>\n Now had that been the end of it we would just have been saying, okay, well next time we’ll just put her in the mei tai. But it wasn’t. She fell asleep, but it wasn’t a nice calm, deep sleep. She was fitful and restless all night long, whimpering, squirming and twitching. I had to soothe her many, many times. She nursed constantly, but never really got a good feed. It was beyond frustrating. I don’t think I even got an hour stretch, I woke up exhausted.<\/p>\n She’s been kind of strung-out today, periods of happy interspersed with periods of crying for no apparent reason. She slept on and off most of the morning, and then we took a 2-hour nap in the afternoon, but she’s still not great. The lack of a good night’s sleep really hit her hard. (Surprisingly I am doing much better than expected.)<\/p>\n Tomorrow is her 4-month ped appointment and I’m definitely interested to see if her ear infection is 100% gone. What I don’t get is why she won’t settle down and fall asleep, why waking back up at that critical moment totally ruins the entire night<\/i>. It is utterly frustrating. Yet normally she lays down and falls asleep without an issue. I mean, before Zeeke woke her up she was happily, peacefully falling asleep without any fuss or complaint.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I love animals. I always have. When I was 7 we got a cat. When I was 12 I got my own dog (with permission from only one parent – yeah, that didn’t go over well). It was like I was born knowing that I had to have them in my life. Which is why […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[475,165],"class_list":["post-3156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-kate","tag-sleep"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3156"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3157,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3156\/revisions\/3157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}