Where sleep and itsy bitsy collide.

There are times when my life seems to have turned into one big swirling mass of "making it through." That makes it seem as though things are quite bleak, which they are not. Things are actually quite wonderful. But life with twins is a shitload of work.

Days sometimes mesh together in odd medleys: poop, bath time, begging the babies to sleep, marathon nursing, and desperately singing Itsy Bitsy Spider as though my very sanity depended on its ability to quell the storm.

The babies have developed a taste for the leisurely life of vacationing. They regularly take vacations from pooping (for 8 days, in our longest stretch), and a particular favorite, vacations from sleep.

Sleep.

Honestly, the word itself makes me want to cry. I love it and miss it so.

Up until about two weeks ago, we had made some progress in the area of sleep. The babies would go down (after much encouragement) in their cribs and sleep for 1-5 hours, after which they would nurse on and off throughout the night but for the most part would transfer happily back into their cribs with nice full bellies. Life was really freaking delicious.

And then.

I wish I could tell you what happened next. But I don't know what it was. And that's a part of the problem. Because all of a sudden, the sleeping just stopped. We seem to be back at square one. "Bed time" is followed by frequent wakings every 20 minutes. This pattern continues on for sometimes as many as five hours. And for the last five nights, this trend has gone on basically all night long, resulting in almost no sleep for the desperate and weary parents.

Last night, somewhere in the midst of a luxurious three hours of sleep, I felt a fluttery little scurry across my forehead and down one of my arms. I don't like things that scurry and went into an immediate state of panic. My panic was quickly overruled by my exhaustion, which refused to cooperate with my repeated commands to flail, jump, scream, and make gagging noises whilst simultaneously slapping at my own flesh until all things scurry-ish met a certain death. So I lay there in a lumpish ball of exhaustion, until finally my still very panicked brain managed to feebly lift an arm and make sloppy swipes in the general direction of arm and forehead.

And really, to be attacked by some unknown predator in my own bed when I'm already sickeningly deprived of sleep hardly seems fair.

Morning came, and perhaps pushed to the edge by my mid-sleep attack, I finally hit "the wall." My reserves were just gone.

I called in tired to work.

I brought the babies to Grammie's house.

I went home and slept. I slept like a person who's drowning gasps for air. Greedily, deeply, desperately.

Close to four hours later, I woke up feeling like Madonna in her cone bra. I rubbed my eyes and looked around.

Laying next to me on my bed was the crumpled dead body of a huge spider.

I killed Itsy Bitsy. And not just with my singing this time.

Am I caught up on sleep? Hardly. But those four hours were beautiful and precious and necessary.

Onward and upward.

Except not for Itsy Bitsy, may he rest in peace as I work on healing the many spider bites all up and down my arms.