sleep is for the weak

I am tired. Exhausted, actually. I think I get less sleep now than when I had a newborn in the house.

When the kids were babies I was always looking forward to the future, when the kids would be just a little older, and would go to bed nicely, sleep all night in their own beds, and wake up well-rested at an acceptable time in the morning. Now I know better. When you're a parent, sleep is a unicorn. A magical, mystical, beautiful creature that you will never actually see or touch because it does not exist.

But I am learning that I need to come to terms with this stage of our lives. Slowly, and with a lot of coffee.

When I was new at parenting, I was under the impression that by the time babies had turned into toddlers, they should be going to bed at 7pm and sleeping all night on their own, giving their parents plenty of time to watch movies and read books at night. Ella was fairly easy to train into this sleep schedule when she moved from a crib to a toddler bed. We would put her in bed, she would cry a bit and sometimes come and sit by her door, but she would always go back to bed fairly quickly and go to sleep. Liam was even easier. He would fall asleep quickly and rarely made a fuss at bedtime.

And then along came Gavin. He is as different as humanly possible from his brother and sister, in every way imaginable. When it comes to sleeping, he does what he wants. And what he wants these days is to hang out with us until 10:30pm, sleep fitfully in our bed with his head on one parent and his feet kicking the other parent, and then wake us all up at 5am. Try as we might, we cannot get him to sleep unless he is good and ready. If we put him in his room at night, he will wander around, play with his stuffed giraffe, wake up his sleeping brother, empty his dresser, and when he gets bored of all that, he will show up in our bedroom (opening doors is his newest accomplishment).

The old me would have been SO frustrated at this turn of events. But even as tired as I am, and as much as I wish I could get a whole night of uninterrupted sleep, I find myself happy to snuggle with my boy when he finally decides to go to sleep. I watch him sleeping and realize that he is never going to be this little ever again. So as I lay beside him, his curls tickling my nose as I inhale his beautiful baby scent, I am thankful for one more night with him.

As we navigate this journey of gentle parenting, we are learning to be more respectful of our kids, their needs, and their desires. So if Gavin isn't ready to go to sleep at 7pm, we try to respect that. We have also learned that Ella isn't ready to go to sleep early, either. She is more of a night owl, much like I used to be. She likes to stay up until 8:30, and then read in her bed for a while before falling asleep. And in a perfect world, she would sleep in until 8:30am, but her little brothers don't always make that a possibility. Liam, on the other hand, is ready for bed by 7:30, and he needs lots of snuggling time before he can fall asleep. We are learning to respect each of their individual internal clocks and allow them the freedom to do what works best for their bodies.

So if that means that I don't get as much sleep as I'd like right now, I try to be ok with it. I try to remind myself in those moments of frustration that the kids won't be this small for long, and I'll miss these little people when they're grown.

And, who knows, maybe one day I will get to ride that mystical Unicorn of Sleep through magical fields of rainbows. You know, when the kids are just a little older.