I miss sleep.

We've had a rough week.  Well, not really, but we've not slept much.  Maybe it's Halloween, the changing season, the unseasonably warm weather - for whatever reason, the girls have had a hard time going to bed, and then they've woken around midnight every night, and again at 3 - it's been rough.  Jimi and I are both operating on very low levels of rest, so we're grouchy and exhausted and a little delirious at times. 

Our girls have never been great sleepers.  Maybe for a night or two when they were itty bitty.  Mostly, they've gotten up at least once or twice (or five times) a night for their entire lives.  When you consider that I also was waking several times a night beginning at about month 5 of my pregnancy with Geneva, that's 4 solid years of shitty sleep for me.  I'm so fucking tired. 

I blame myself.  Of course I do.  I'm their mom, it's obviously my fault that something about them is not ideal.  Right?  Seriously, I think it's because I've nursed them on demand for so long, because I've never sleep trained them, I've never consistently made them stay in their beds and cry themselves to sleep - so of course Geneva runs into my bedroom at 2 a.m. and demands I go lay down with her, because "3 year olds are very little and need their mommies!" (as she tearfully explains).  Of course Cora wakes at 3:35 every morning and refuses to even pretend to attempt to go back to sleep until her diaper has been changed and her belly has been filled with milkies. 

Cora turns two on the 15th of this month.  I'm done.  I'm cutting them off.  It's so far beyond time to end this sweet period in our lives that it's no longer sweet - it's a sour burden that I dread and resent and man, that's not how it's supposed to be. 

I don't know how we're going to do this just yet.  I've started taking to them about how mommies only have milkies when the babies are little and need the milkies, and now that they're both such big girls, mommy isn't going to have milkies anymore, that the milkies will go away.  Geneva understood this to mean: "Your milkies are going to go away because we're big.  Then you'll have little nipples like me."  So we've got some more talking to do, but I think she mostly gets the idea.

I'm just so tired.  If this doesn't work, I'm going to have to start sleeping on a blowup mattress upstairs.  They wouldn't think to look for me upstairs.  And I bet after a few nights of mommy not responding to their middle-of-the-night wake-ups, I bet they'd cut that shit right out.  We found an article recently that talked about how it's been scientifically proven that children behave worse in front of their mothers than in front of any other adult; I'm so glad it's not just true in my home.  My girls aren't bad, they are very sweet and wonderful - they're just manipulative as fuck when it comes to me and I'm a sucker.

So that's where we are in the Fowler home at 7:26 this lovely Saturday morning in November.  I don't know if it's actually a lovely Saturday or not - it's still dark outside.  We turn the clocks back tonight, so it can be dark when we get to work and dark when we get home for a few months, to challenge our society's mental health status. 

I'm a ray of sunshine this morning.  I should probably take a nap...