As every parent surely knows, one of the first things that fly out the window when your little bundle of joy arrives is sleep. The first year is probably the worst, but between bad dreams, nighttime fears, yechy-feeling bodies and similar, sleep continues to be but a distant memory for us. And this week has been super hard, so far. It’s funny, from a distance, but up close, well, can I nap and still stay on schedule?

Two nights ago was probably the most entertaining of our recently adventure with sleeplessness: our new cat “Angel” figured out how to open the bedroom door and waltzed in proudly at 5am. She checked out the room then stood in the middle and said “mrrooooowwww!”. We all woke up, and rather than being coherent and picking her up to give her the boot from our room, no-one did anything and, surprise, she did it again.

Ug. A- and I ended up getting up and so that night of sleep was aborted at 5am for me. L-, fortunately, fell back asleep so she fared better than we did. Angel, for the record, didn’t seem at all adversely affected by her nocturnal explorations.

Last night both kids had a hard night, and consequently so did we. At about 1am A- started crying, clearly lost in a bad dream of some sort, so I pulled her into our bed to sooth her. It worked, but then I had a hard time getting back to sleep, and L-, well, she didn’t end up with much room, and that definitely adversely affected her sleep last night.

Sometimes it feels like a never-ending treadmill, this sleep thing. We’re very big on attachment parenting so there’s no way that we’re going to shunt our kids into their own rooms to ‘cry it out’ and learn to ‘sleep alone’ at this young age, but sometimes the weight of that burden seems to crowd out the visible and obvious advantages.

So if a genie showed up and asked us for three wishes, I think the first would be a good, long night’s sleep. The other two, hmmm… world peace would be high on my list, as would perhaps the underlying idea of more understanding, more compassion and less judgment in all peoples, and, I dunno. I don’t feel like I need a genie to help with income (well, maybe a winning lottery number? 🙂 but I’m sure we could come up with something good. And, I’ve always wondered why my third wish couldn’t be “and twenty more wishes granted”. I know you’re not “supposed to” wish for that, but, what, are there rules for this sort of thing or something??