Be aware - this is a hastily written vent of epic proportions…..

At the risk of sounding juvenile/hormonal - I hate bedtime. Ihateit-Ihateit-Ihateit-Ihateit. Although I love my girls, and am profoundly grateful for {almost} every moment I have them with me, I. HATE. BEDTIME.

It is 10:24pm. Julianna finally fell asleep 15 minutes ago. Bella is still awake, and has come out of the room four times in the 15 minutes since her sister fell asleep. This is not unusual. Bedtime can often last two hours or more from start to finish, and usually involves tears, threats, frustration, threats, tears, anger, resentment, tears and threats. Nobody is happy.

Clearly we’ve lost the ability to control the situation and at this point I’m beginning to question if we ever really had it.

Back when we just had Bella - our lives were guided by routine and gentle schedule. Bella always thrived on predictability, and our lives at the time allowed us to provide her with that. I was ‘just’ a SAHM, not trying to be birth worker/photographer/non-profit director. Sam had not yet gotten his big promotion at work, and so had a regular schedule of 7am-4pm, arriving home like clockwork at 4:45pm every night - when we all had dinner together. Our weekends were mainly free to rest, relax and spend quality time together as a family. Bella napped at regular intervals during the day when she was younger, and went to sleep easily at night - bath, a few books, a little rock in the rocking chair, and her lullaby CD on to fall asleep on her own.

Life now is so much more hectic. It feels like we are on the go so much that Julianna has never had a regular nap schedule. Like any SAHM, I’m trying to squeeze in all my other commitments in stolen moments between meals, and diaper changes and lego towers. Sam is under tremendous pressure at work - often coming home for dinner and heading back to work until 11pm or later. Our weekends seem filled with running this way and that, errand after commitment after ‘just one more thing’. We’re trying to juggle (financially and logistically) the remodel in the midst of all the other craziness as well. We’re overwhelmed, cranky, tired, stressed, distracted and disconnected. Not surprisingly, this has turned the girls’ day to day lives on end as well.

They are such good sports, and really go with the flow quite well all day, but at night time I really feel the brunt of all this craziness coming out. The girls share a room and a queen size bed. Once upon a time this seemed a good idea, and actually used to work fairly well. Now, however, it’s just a disaster. It seems that if one of them is tired and ready to settle down, the other is wired and ready to go (and vice versa). They feed off each other, and not in a good way. About 90% of the time, Julianna demands my presence to fall asleep (the only way she’ll ever accept Sam is if I pretend to leave and she actually sees me drive away in the car - even then there’s a 50/50 chance that she’ll cry till I come in to get her anyway). Even with me there, she often finds something to cry hysterically about these days. To go to sleep, she wants to fiddle with my belly button (“Give me my belly” she says with great authority). She pinches, pokes, prods with her sharp little nails, sometimes to the point of making it scab. And I let her, I let her because I’m so desperate for her just to settle and fall asleep.

They are both tired, so tired. I have to drag Bella out of bed every morning - she’ll sleep till 9:30 or later if I let her, but then it becomes even more impossible to get her to sleep at night. Julie wakes at 5am and I have two choices - either get up with her then for the day, or lie awake in bed and nurse for the next several hours (try as I might, I usually can’t sleep through it). And yes - if we do get up at 5am, she’s still impossible to put to bed at night. Her naps are iffy at best. She’ll often go all day without a nap - especially if we’re busy and on the go. When that happens she normally falls asleep nursing around dinner time, and wakes up screaming a few hours later…and (you guessed it) it is near impossible to settle her back to sleep. When she does nap, it’s not a long one - half an hour, 45 minutes tops.

Almost every night, at some point during the entire bedtime process, I can feel myself seething with resentment. I hear how stressed and bitter and utterly horrid I sound when I speak to them - all of my frustration being taken out on them in the moment. Quite simply, I feel like a big pile of shit.

I need to find a way to make this better, for them, for me, for all of us. We’re so far out of wack though, that I don’t even know where to start. What I do know, this is but a symptom of a much larger problem - but I’ve got to start somewhere. I leave on Tuesday for a month-long trip home, where I’ll be single parenting for the entire month of July. When we return to Phoenix Sam should already be moved into the new house, so there will be yet another transition for the girls. I really, really need to start making this flow better right now, or I fear I might loose my mind at some point soon.

Still, despite it all, when they finally fall asleep I stay there with them, breathing them in, touching Julie’s soft skin, tracing the curve of Bella’s nose, watching their chests rise and fall. I guess that is what tells me that it will all be okay.