Phoebe and sleep quality

For the past several days, perhaps even since she had COVID, Phoebe has slept for an average of 40 minutes at a time. It's been brutal and the only way we've been surviving is by alternating shifts of being on Phoebe duty and sneaking in a nap or sleep-in. Andrew took Phoebe duty last night while I slept (11 PM to 3 AM) and helped her back to sleep eighteen times. 

It's like the part in her brain that tells her to sleep just...broke...all of a sudden.

But tonight she's been...pretty good. 

She went down for the night while her siblings were enjoying a cool-ish (mid-80°s) summer evening outside and has only woken up once...so far. Let's all hope this holds because clearly I've been doing other things when I should have been taking advantage of this moment for sleeping purposes. 

It seems what she needed to do in order to sleep again was finally sample the cat food, something she's been trying to do for weeks and finally succeeded at doing today. She was pretty proud of herself. 

That's what's most perplexing about her/our lack of sleep—Phoebe can wake up every half hour or so all night long and still wake up in the morning ready to take on the day. She pokes her little tongue out of her mouth and makes all sorts of curious grunts as she squirms her way around the house getting into mischief. Andrew and I, on the other hand, are barely able to roll out of bed and are manually holding our eyelids open. 

It's bad. 

So bad that I have to admit that I just typed "it's bed" on the previous line, rather than "it's bad."

It's bad.

But, perhaps we've turned a corner and can get back to the regular pains of parenthood rather than the this-is-literal-torture pains of parenthood. One can hope.

So while Andrew and I have been drowning in sleep deficit, here are a few things Phoebe has been up to...

On Sunday evening we broke out this little-kid roller coaster thing. We used to have it up in the LEGO room but disassembled it a while back because...it just kept getting covered in LEGO. 

Alexander was certainly happy to have it back and Phoebe loves sitting on the little car.

She also loves pulling alphabet magnets off the fridge:

Sticking her tongue out at everyone and everything (something might taste good out there...you never know):

She was so excited about something that I couldn't even get a decent photo of her. Everything was blurry because she was too busy bouncing and giggling, with that little tongue wagging in the wind.

Here she is choosing a song to sing for Primary or FHE:

She loves getting into books, even though she's not supposed to. It's a pretty easy thing for her to get into, honestly, because the kids leave books all over the floor for her, even though they're not supposed to. She's got a billion board books but her favourite is a nice, flimsy paperback that she can bend and chew. Keeping books away from her is a constant battle. 

Books and cat food, evidently.

It's a losing battle, and it's a daily battle. It's a daily losing battle. 

We're nothing if not gluttons for punishment.

Here she is casually pulling up to stand at the fireplace...because she can do that now. 

She isn't quite crawling on her hand and knees yet, but she can get up on her hands and knees, and from there she can kneel down or sit down, if she wants to. So the girl has options now—front, back, up, down—and she enjoys exercising those options 24/7.