Sweet Slumber and Wet T-Shirts

#1) I have never been a squeamish girl. I love a good day of playing in the dirt. I'm not afraid to kill a bug (I do HATE cockroaches.) I think worms and slugs are interesting and I can't wait to show Ella how a worm tickles when it crawls between your fingers. I don't mind smelling a little funky, be it from a day of playing soccer or running in the park or a weekend of camping and listening to good live music in a field (my husband is a reforming smelly hippy.)

#2) I love sleep. Me and sleep are like peanut butter and jelly. We are meant for one another. I function ok without it, but if given the choice I would choose sleep over most anything. This was true even before becoming a sleep deprived momma. I can push myself to function with little sleep, but it's not about how I function. I genuinely love snuggling down between cool sheets with the weight of a blanket on my legs, rubbing my cheek over the pillow and feeling my body fall into sleep. ( There is a picture of me sleeping in one of my high school year books, passed out on top of an open text book. I will have to scan this later and post it to give you a smile.)

What do these two things have to do with the title of this entry you ask??

Ella Grace has started sleeping in longer stretches as night. She will go down around 9 and sleep until 3, wake up to nurse and then fall back asleep until 5 or 6.  GREAT! Sleep is mine once again! Right? If I went to sleep with Ella Grace at 9 that would be six hours straight followed by another 2-3 hours. That would be the logical thing to do right? I've done this exactly once. Want to know why?? Even though I have no problem with getting dirty, and even though I am driven by a deep love of sleep, I HATE really really HATE waking up with a wet t-shirt from leaky boobs. I will take a shower in the middle of the night if I wake up in a wet t-shirt. I don't know what it is about the feel of a milk soaked shirt that bugs me so much, but it is currently my ultimate gross-out. 

So instead of getting glorious, dazzling, marvelous, divine, sublime, brilliant sleep- I stay awake until midnight, nurse my sleeping babe and then sleep myself from about 1 to 6 if I'm lucky. 5 hours is my current goal. 5 hours a night to keep my motor running. At the 5 hour mark, I wake up, boobs starting to ache, but t-shirt dry!  I guess this is my pattern for now. I do try to get Ella Grace to sleep for another hour or 2 after that 6 am feeding so that I can doze a little but more before getting up for the day.  

Five hours of sleep and I can go go go until midnight or 1 am. Pushing to get things done. Eventually I'm sure I will crash. I will have to take an afternoon nap with Ella Grace, or get a grandma or friend to play with her for 2 hours so I can sleep. Until then, I keep going and going and going and....

I'll let you in on a little secret, during those five hours of sleep I dream of the day where I can say, "Sean, tomorrow you get up with Ella Grace in the morning. I'm sleeping till noon."