It is Saturday and I am sitting on the couch with my daughter. We are watching Frozen, after watching many hours of nauseating Nick Jr. shows on demand.

For dinner, she has eaten a bowl of broccoli with cheese, while a plate of chicken dinosaurs and Dr. Praeger’s dinosaur-shaped yam patties languish untouched on her plate; I have eaten a bowl of edamame and three Yam Dinosaurs.

Last night’s clean dishes are still in the dishwasher; today’s lunch and breakfast dishes remain unscrubbed in the sink. My child is not wearing pants.

We did manage to go to swimming lessons this morning, so one of us got some exercise.

We also accomplished a two-hour nap: good for her, and, on a reducing-the-sleep-debt level, for me as well (although naps always make me feel a) wasteful and b) headachy.).

I feel quite guilty at wasting a beautiful, sunny Saturday inside in front of the idiot box. Especially because my poor husband is on call and has been at the hospital for going on 14 hours already. Saving lives and improving people’s quality of life and such. While I can’t even screw up the energy to go for a walk around the block.

Whatevs.

We are in the midst of A Poor Sleep Phase of life, which is not fun. It’s never fun, FYI. Carla is having a very hard time getting to sleep at night. We’ve tried cry it out. We’ve tried moving the bedtime UP and moving it BACK. We’ve tried allowing her to play in her room. We’ve tried sleeping with her. It’s all resulted in roughly the same thing, which is that she falls asleep by 10:15 or so each night. On average. Which means that on the best nights it’s about nine and on the worst nights it’s about 11:30.

We also briefly tried eliminating her nap, in hopes that her sleep needs would increase at night, but that tactic had its own issues: 1.) We can only truly eliminate it on the weekends; her daycare won’t/can’t. So the inconsistency was getting inconsistent results. 2.) I complained about the sleep issue to her pediatrician, and when I told him what we were trying to correct it, looked at me with mild alarm and said, “If she’s still napping, DON’T cut the nap.”

Here is where I feel compelled to go into Great Detail about all the other methods we’ve tried. But I’m too tired and you probably don’t care. Whatever. Sleep issues are a dime a dozen, and what works or doesn’t work for one person may or may not work for another person. This IS a phase that will end EVENTUALLY. It will likely be replaced, at some point, by something worse.

My mother-in-law said cheeringly today that she once read sleep issues of this sort can indicate high intelligence in a child. That sounds right up there with “morning sickness is often an indication of a healthy pregnancy” and “a steep drop in the stock market is a good opportunity to expand your portfolio” and “rain on your wedding day means good luck for your marriage.” They may be true or they may be gentle padding for a rough time, but they don’t make enduring the present unpleasantness less pleasant.

I was comforted for a while that Carla’s current issue has only been affecting the BEGINNING of sleep. Once she falls asleep, she sleeps straight through until seven the next morning. But then – after falling asleep at 11:00 last night – she woke up at about 2:30, bright and ready to play, and didn’t fall back to sleep until 4:17. Ask my eye bags and hamper of half-folded laundry how I know the exact duration of her wakefulness. This reminds me that a few weeks? months? ago, Carla was waking up at 3:00 or 4:00 many mornings and falling back to sleep around six.

And that reminder reminds me that one of the things that’s making this CURRENT issue difficult is that I keep wailing, “But Carla used to be SUCH a Good Sleeper!”

But I don’t know if that’s really TRUE. There was a long period of time where she REFUSED to go to sleep without nursing. And then, when she gave up nursing, she would only go to sleep after a bottle. I seem to recall that the time after she turned two – when we cut her off the bottle cold turkey – was particularly rough in terms of Getting to Sleep. Then, in the past six or eight months, there was a time when she would only fall asleep in OUR bed. And there was another stretch when she woke up in the middle of the night and would only go back to sleep in our bed (which means that she is the only one of the three of us who sleeps; she’s a wiggler and a kicker). If you look at all of those examples – blurry and seen through droopy, half-awake eyes and a fuzzy, sleep-deprived brain – it seems like she’s been in a Poor Sleep Phase more often than not.

Probably it is most accurate to say that there have been Intermittent Periods of Good Sleep. Lasting a few blissful weeks or months. But long enough to give us all a taste of what that feels like. So when the next Poor Sleep phase pops up, it seems especially harsh and hard to deal with.

My mother pointed out that we all know going in that sleep is not something parents have in abundance. The way she said it made it seem matter of fact and also like it would be true for the ENTIRETY of the parent/child relationship. And I’m too tired today to recognize whether what I feel about that concept is resignation or horror.