This sucks

It's not all darling anecdotes and smiling babies at the Rauser-Clapper household.  Sometimes being a parent of two little kids really sucks.  I'm so sleep-deprived, and unlike my brother I do not function well on little sleep.  By last evening, I was really tired and ready for bed early.  But when you have two little kids you can't just give yourself a good night's sleep when you really need one-- it's up to the whims of the children.  That lack of control over something as basic as my own sleep really gets to me.  As it happened it went like this: I got in bed before 8 pm.  Aggie woke at 8; I decided not to go in to her, since I had just nursed her and put her down to sleep at 6 pm.  She cried for 15 minutes and then went to sleep.  I was just about asleep when she woke again at 9.  Capitulating, I went in and nursed her.  Back to bed around 9:20, then awakened again at 11.  She cried for just a minute or so-- long enough to wake me up-- and then went back to sleep on her own.  Then she woke at 1 am.  I went in and nursed her; back to bed around 1:30 am.  

At 2:30 am, Henry woke up crying "MAMA," because he had wet his bed-- again.  Last evening I had decided he needed to wear a pull-up diaper at night until he woke up dry several days in a row, because I cannot handle an additional wake-up and freak-out by him when I'm already getting up with Agatha several times a night.  I don't like to discourage him from wearing underwear, but I can't deal with these wet beds all the time.  But at bedtime he talked me out of it-- he really wanted to wear underwear to bed, so I let him.  But at 2:30 I was cursing my own stupidity.  Michael got up and made everything right with him, but I was still awake and now so fried, frazzled, and enraged at the constant wake-ups that I could not go back to sleep.  At 4 am I just decided to get up, to assert some control, because at least if I were awake by choice then I would feel less powerless.  Plus I knew Aggie would be waking up for the day around 5 am anyway, and I have work to do-- I teach my seminar today and still need to finish the reading and make the slide presentation, and the main time I would have to work would be during Aggie's morning nap.  

So here we are at 5:30 am, Aggie and me, with a full day of work and childcare stretching ahead, unprepared for class, and going on 4.5 hours of fractured sleep.