I am deprived of sleep

I vaguely remember what it’s like to have a full nights sleep, to wake up at 9ish with a full bladder to the aromas of a cooked breakfast frying away merrily downstairs*. If I was tired back then it was because I’d been up half the night drinking or had snuck into bed at 5am after staying up most of the night playing Championship Manager on the PC only to get up two hours later and pretend I’d actually turned in at the much more respectable 11ish.

Ever since M’laddo entered the world to Megadeth’s Symphony of Destruction two and a half years ago I’ve not had an uninterupted nights sleep. That’s not to say I’m up all night being manly and doing more than my fair share of feeding and so on because to be honest I’m not, I’m the main bread winner in the cool household and since I do a fairly technical job I do need to know what I’m doing and be at least vaguely aware of my surroundings most of the time, so for the vast majority of the time, wifey does all the nocturnal stuff with the wee lass and I occasionally stumble into M’laddo’s room and climb into bed with him when he’s distressed. Note: I’ve only started doing this since he got a bed, it would have been too impractical when he was still in his cot.

Just when he successfully started sleeping through the night, the wee lass came along and the whole thing started over. She’s now a couple weeks shy of being 9 months old but she still thinks shes a newborn- waking up all night long, wanting a 5am bottle and generally being boystrous in a loud sort of way that M’laddo never managed. He was definitely a hard work baby but he wasn’t quite as loud as she is.

I realised the sleep deprivation was beginning to take its toll the other night when I started having real trouble reading one of the Thomas the Tank Engine stories (Bulstrode, if you’re really interested). I actually had to read each paragraph to myself before reading it out loud in case I made such as mess of it that sense went out of the window. I have a degree in English literature and a good one at that.

I’m constantly forgetting things, the number of times I get about 100 yards from the house on my way to work and realise I’ve left my lunch/keys/phone/trousers** at home are too numerous to count.

What’s more amazing though is wifey. She has considerably less kip than me, often takes hours to drop off after getting up for a feed, and has to cope with two hyperactive children all day, cook the dinner and put up with my grumpiness when I get less than 8 hours kip. And she does all this with the most wonderfully even temprement, which is nothing short of utterly amazing. I feel embarressed complaining about my tiredness when she’s much more knackered than me, but I suppose it doesn’t make me less tired knowing there is someone asleep next to me more exhausted than I am.

Hats off to wifey then, me, I’m off to get a head start on tomorrow nights Thomas book :)