6 months is harder than 6 weeks.

My sister Laurie is my constant supporter - here she is on a day we were
both so tired we couldn't even sit up, giving S his bottle.
Sorry her head is cut off. You can see the whole photo here.

Oh, friends. What can I say? I'm a mama on the edge!

What happened to my nights? Even though I was never sleeping a ton, at least nights used to be manageable. Now, suddenly, both of the boys are waking throughout the night, and I'm not getting any sleep. I've got so many books on sleep on order at the library, they're going to think I'm working on a PhD. I'm considering every perspective on infant sleep - I figure instead of basing my strategy on reputation, I'd better apply the principle of independent investigation of the truth, and find out for myself what tools are there and which ones I'm going to try. Simply responding to my babies is decidedly not working.

I'm just stretched so thin, I don't know what to do. Even if I go to bed right after they do, at 8 or 8:30, I'm so anxious about what's to come that I can't fall asleep. Starting at 11, it's one baby after another. Shoghi still nurses throughout the night, which I used to love. Now, he sucks so hard that it hurts. Is this teething? Is it developmental? By 4 in the morning, he's been nursing for hours, and then he's awake. Even if I resort to trying to fill him up with a bottle, he doesn't necessarily fall back to sleep, and then of course, Max is up, too, and I have both of them, either ready for the day or crying. Sometimes I put them back in their bassinets and listen to them cry, other times I bring them both into the bed, one tucked under each arm, and listen to them cry. I'm just out of energy, and it is so emotionally challenging to do this night after night, I can't even tell you. It's depressing that this is actually harder than when they were tiny, harder than when Shoghi had the terrible reflux/apnea.

Anyway, despite all of these problems, things are still fun sometimes. Max was just 2 days behind Shoghi with rolling to his stomach from his back, and he does it over and over, while Shoghi seems to have forgotten how. Max is scooting forward on his belly, too! Meanwhile, Shoghi has fallen in love with our new swing (thx, Eliz!), and now routinely falls asleep in there for daytime naps by himself. I'm desperate enough that I'm considering having him sleep in the darned thing all night.

Food introductions deserves its own post, but I've been at it for about a month now. I'm going to try to talk about this and my continuing adventure with nursing at another time.

So, although some of the problems from earlier this week are resolved (everything is fine with my credit union - they just hadn't received my change of address), more seems to be unraveling. Somehow I am going to survive this first year, I know. The boys are clearly thriving. I really could have never imagined just how much harder twins is compared to a singleton, but here I am, living it every day. I love these two amazing boys more than anything, so I know we'll get through it for the better. Please send me all of your encouragement and good thoughts, though... I really need them.