Sleep

I find that sleep times fall into a bimodal distribution of "early birds" and "night owls". Although not senior-citizen early, I find that I've been an early bird most of my life. I usually go to bed between 10-11pm. My husband, on the other hand, tends to be more of a night owl. However, our sleep patterns have been altered since we had our daughter. Of course the early months of her infancy required multiple night feedings and therefore multiple wakings during the night but now that she's 22-months old, one would expect a more regular sleep schedule. Unfortunately, sleep (or the lack of) is one of those things that consistently resurfaces as an issue. In general, Scarlett has been a relatively good sleeper: she's been sleeping through the night since she was about 4 months old. There were definitely hiccups here and there, especially when she got sick but we have been lucky that she's been able to put herself to sleep sucking her thumb. For the last several months, however, she's been waking up sometime in the middle of the night and robbing us of our quality sleep time. Take Tuesday night, for example. She woke up at 3am and even though I was successful in not bringing her to our bed, she still kept me up until 6am, when she finally fell asleep (she slept until 7:30am and that was it!). My husband, on the other hand, decided that he would just end up not sleeping anyway, as past experience has shown, so he just got up at 3am and did work instead. Come Wednesday night, we were both so tired that we went to bed early: He was in bed by 8:30pm. I went to bed at 9pm, thinking that it has gotta be "wrong" to be going to bed when it's not even dark outside. No matter - I think I fell asleep within minutes. Sad, isn't it? I don't know how dual full-time working parents do it. I'm just glad that I'm not still working at my former full-time job that's 50 miles away. I probably would've fallen asleep at the wheel and THAT would not be good.