Coming clean

It's been a rough few weeks around here.

It started when Nathan had a growth spurt right around Thanksgiving.  So he started waking up more at night.  And then he caught a cold.  Babies with colds aren't fun, especially when they use a soother to fall asleep because they can't suck and breathe at the same time when their nose is plugged.  Then I caught the cold, which just made me feel even more exhausted and crummy from having to blow my nose all the time.

Of course, just when I started Nathan on a warming socks treatment which helped him to sleep better at night, then Kaylee caught the cold.  Except hers went straight to her chest and she wound up with an extremely painful cough that kept her up at night.

She is finally over the worst of it, and I got in one night of "decent"-ish, somewhat back to normal sleep from Nathan before Reuben decided his cough needed to develop into something a bit worse, and he had to have his turn waking Mommy up at all wee hours of the morning.

I'd be lying if I didn't say that all this lack of sleep and fighting off sickness hasn't affected my already somewhat fragile mental status.  The reason I haven't been posting lately is just as much because I haven't had the desire to, and not just because I can't find the time while caring for three kids instead of two.  It's hard to tell if the fog I feel I related to lack of sleep or something else.

Can you see me avoiding the word post-partum depression?  Can you?  Can you?  Because I'm not sure I'm ready to say that's what this is yet.  For now, I'm just really tired.  But it's on my radar, and I hate that.  It feels a bit like I'm losing the battle I've been fighting ever since Nathan was born, take my supplements, make sure I get time for myself, try to get enough sleep (whoever says sleep when the baby sleeps obviously didn't have other children...)

So I get up each morning, dark and early, and I daily rely on God's strength to get me out of bed.  Literally.  We had a discussion in my women's Bible study group about starting the day with prayer, and some of them tell about how they wake up and say, "Good morning God!" all cheerful like and have a nice prayer.  My morning prayer: "Oh God, get me out of bed."  And so far, somehow every morning I get out of bed.

More sleep would help to make that easier.

...and as a side note, this morning as I'm writing this is following a night of particularly bad sleep, which always makes my mood worse.  If I sound particularly miserable, it's because today I'm feeling particularly miserable.  But for the record, not all days are this bad.  And sometimes just writing about the bad days can make things seem not so dim...

I'll try not to take so long to post again...