"Are You Awake?"

I feel like such a mean mother as I sit here listening to Caleb cry... unfortunately, he inherited my sleeping gene.

He wants to keep going and going and going all day long and doesn't think he needs a nap. If he doesn't take a nap, he starts to get whiny and fussy and hyperactive, as you can see in this video of his overtired bath. If he does take a nap, it takes about 15 minutes for his brain and body to relax enough for him to drift off to sleep. Then he wakes up about 15 minutes later thinking it's time to go again and doesn't realize he needs sleep and should just allow himself to fall back to sleep.

Short tangent: At night, if I am not so overtired that I fall asleep while Allen and I say our prayers (an almost nightly occurrence that is pretty funny, considering the fact that I am the one who says our night prayers as a couple and I fall asleep while praying out loud, mid-sentence), then it takes me at least ten minutes longer than Allen to fall asleep and I will almost always whisper, "Are you awake?" If he's sleeping, he isn't disturbed. But even if he's almost asleep, he is nice and listens while I ask him some question or tell him about some little detail of the day that I am thinking about that is keeping me awake.

Back to Caleb: Sometimes I am his accomplice in short naps. When I go in to calm him down and get him to go back to sleep, he smiles up at me from the crib with the look that says, "I'm ready to play Mom!" I just don't have the heart to leave him to cry himself to sleep again... so I take him out and decide to try for a longer nap next time. That has happened twice today, so now after his twenty minute nap, I mustered up all of the courage that I could and went in, calmed him down and told him (even though he doesn't understand) that it's still nap time.

He was eating his fist, talking, smiling and playing with his foot when I went to get him back to sleep in the middle of nap number  two.

I am now watching him drift off to sleep on the baby monitor... he falls asleep, only to twitch and wake himself back up again, which begins the crying and head-tossing again for half a minute before he falls asleep again. If Allen were here, he'd help me to not give in to allow Caleb to get the sleep he needs. So here I sit, typing, listening and avoiding more cleaning...

...I gave in. Time for Caleb and I to play.