Tuesday, November 30, 2010

sleep

Ok, I know, a month and a half absence probably deserves more explanation....Lately I just haven't been excited to write. The blog feels like a chore to accomplish and that isn't how I want it. Or maybe it just feels overwhelming, I'm not even sure. But tonight I am giving it a go, in hopes that I get into it again. I think the photo bit is especially frustrating because I have been feeling lazier and lazier each month about actually organizing and editing all our photos. So no photos tonight either. Sorry.

So without further ado, here is how my children sleep.

Annika:
Always on her back, arms crossed behind her head, looking like a pristine princess. Her little lips pout a bit when she sleeps and she is so adorable, it is ridiculous. She doesn't move much and always has her blankets still on, unless she happened too get hot and kicked them off. In actuality, what I want to write about it how she wakes.....

Anytime you wake up Annika, she is nearly always, completely out of control. Since she was very young. She kicks, hits, cries, yells... Nothing I can do calms her once she gets like this. Randomly, she sometimes wakes up happy. I have no idea why. If I am really on top of things, I wake her up and immediately scoop her, plus a blanket, up into my arms. She really likes that and will generally not fuss too much, especially if I carry her upstairs and put her on the kitchen counter so she can pick her cereal.

If Annika wakes up on her own, for ages, she used to come to the bottom of the stairs and cry and cry. She would refuse to walk up the stairs and I'd have to go down and carry her up, otherwise she threw extremely prolonged tantrums. Lately she's been doing better waking up on her own and likes to climb into Saben's bed and look at books with him until one of them hears us moving around upstairs. Huge relief, because she's been doing the crying thing as long as I can remember. But again, sometimes she would be absolutely fine, like one morning a week. If only I knew the magic of that one morning....

Saben:

Saben is almost always on his belly, legs askance, hands behind his back, in all sorts of weird positions, just like Michael J Fox in "Back to the Future". His blankets are never on him, but I don't think its cause he's too hot, he just moves around a lot.

When I wake Saben up in the morning, it takes him about five seconds to wake and pop up with a huge, alert smile on his face. Seriously, you could not have two more opposite wake-up styles. He is NEVER grumpy, never cries, and he never was like annika at all, even when he was little. He starts chattering, makes jokes and is generally more alert than I am.

When he wakes himself up, same thing. Just reads magazines in bed and then sneaks upstairs to see if we are awake.

I love how different my two kids are, and even though Annika's grumpiness is tiring sometimes...there is something endearing about it...it is so "her".