Wake-up call

When I was pregnant with my first child, I had a million ideas about what parenthood was going to be like. Most of them were romantic and misinformed. Mainly my fantasies consisted of beautiful happy children running laughing through my house and giving me heaps of cuddles.
None of my fantasies included me feeling less than perfect. Although I have to admit being worried about having a migraine around kids, that seemed horrible... I did realise that lying in bed a whole day in a dark room was going to be more than hard. Besides, children are known for being loud, so that would be a problem as well since I get very sensitive to noise when I have a migraine attack.

Okey, so I knew the infant period was going to be tough, that sleep would be a premium and that babies scream a lot. But I had serious delusions about young children, and let's face it, our offspring are young children for much longer then they are infants!

No one tells you much about having young children before you have babies, and not many anecdotes about the 2-4year olds come out when you are pregnant. Everybody get very reminiscent about the baby stage. And when your baby is born and you struggle, the helpful people around you tell you that it's all going to get better, easier and that everything will solve itself, like magic. Which kinda lulls you into this false sense of, oh okey it must all get sorted by the age of 2.

No one I knew told me that 4.5 year olds still wake their parents in the middle of the night, several times a week, or that they can still go through periods of waking up at 5.10 in the morning and think its completely okey to come in to your bed and start demanding teve. And if anyone did tell me, I wrote them off as complete failures...

In South Melbourne the townhall has a beautiful old bell that rings the hours between 6am and 10pm. We used to tell the 4 year old to wait until he heard the bell in the morning, before he came in. At 5.20 one morning we asked if he had heard the bell, and my favorite reply was: yes.... (and very quietly) - Last week....

In other words, its really, really hard to stop this behaviour, and there are days when I dream of when they are 14 and 16 and fantasies about revenge...

For a long time we only had the 4 year old treating us midnight cuddles. Mainly since he was learning to sleep without his nappy and woke up to go to the toilet 2-3 times a night. Which for some reason he stronlgy believed we needed witness, every time. But, just as his little body was getting used to not needing to pee all night, his brother worked out how to climb out of the cot!

So now it's like a little lottery, who is going to come in, at what time, and how hard is it going to be to make them go back to sleep in their own bed?! If we do take the little cuddle-monkey back into their room, will he wake his brother and join forces?
We are generally lucky, only about 1-2 nights a week are disrupted before early morning. Mostly it's the pre-6am wake-up call which haunts me.

Therefore I have determined, that it is not the being pregnant, or the breast feeding or being awake all nights with an infant which prematurely ages mothers. It's actually the prolonged sleep deprivation which comes with small children.

I must say I was right about one thing when I was pregnant and delusional, I did end up with 2 beautiful, happy children that run laughing through the house and give me big cuddles, it's just that it's 2 in the morning.... !