Road Trip

This will almost certainly be my last post in the state of Arizona. My mom arrives today. The packers come Tuesday. They load the truck Wednesday. I'm not sure yet what day my car will leave, but D-day (departure day) is looming over our heads and approaching with appalling rapidity.

You'd think that things wouldn't be too hectic with someone else packing up your house. Ah, not so, my friends. All except the neat freaks, picture your home right now. Is everything truly in the right place? Did you put away your necklace last night, or leave it on your nightstand? Are all your bills filed? When was the last time you purged your closet? How about your bookshelves? Are your CDs in their cases? Did you ever get rid of all those VHSs you never watch anymore? What about that project you started in the garage and never finished? I consider myself fairly organized, though admittedly significantly less so since the Liliputian's debut. But this kind of organization, this fast...our head's are spinning.

Not to mention that you also have to get everything off the walls and disassemble all disassemble-able pieces: curtain rods, desks, bookcases with cardboard backs, wall storage systems, wall shelves...this list goes on and on. And you can't drill at night if you have a baby sleeping in the next room.

Not that she's sleeping all that much these days anyway. Remember how she started sleeping through the night at two months? A distant memory. She's sleeping worse every night and no longer taking real naps during the day either. I fear she's overtired, which makes babies sleep worse, and we're caught in this vicious cycle where she can't sleep because she hasn't slept which makes it even harder for her to sleep. So I'm back to sleeping in one- to two-hour stretches, totaling four to five hours per night.

And did I mention that maternity leave is officially over? I quit my job at the hospital, obviously, because we're moving, but I'm back in the rotation with the freelance copy editing and guess who just got slammed with two issues due pretty much as soon as we get to Tennessee?

So I have a little anxiety that goes something like this: I'm having insomnia because of everything whirring through my head that needs to be done and am compulsively making lists of lists. My baby isn't sleeping which is keeping me up having to feed her but also trying to figure out how to improve the situation with any tactic that isn't ridiculous to start right before we're about to move and screw up her schedule anyway. I'm worried that so much fatigue is going to leave me susceptible to illness again, threaten my milk supply, and make it unsafe for me to drive long hours across the country (my mom's not so comfortable with a standard transmission after many years of automatics). And then there's the potential for missed deadlines with the copy editing that put my job at risk, or at the very least reflect poorly on my performance making it harder to ask for a raise in the future.

The counterarguments to all this are as follows: Insomnia is insomnia. The worst thing you can do is worry about it. The bright side of the Papoosekin's sleep being screwy now is that I don't have to worry about the move messing it up. We can just start from square one once we're settled in the new house. We have at least five days to make it across the country. That's an average of only 4.5 hours per day. I know I can manage that, even if I have to take a break every hour. If I miss a copy editing deadline, it would be bad, but I probably wouldn't lose my job.

The immune system and milk supply concerns are legit, though. I can't talk myself out of those ones.

Anyway, enough whining. I'm sure it'll all be fine in the end. I just needed to dump all that out of my brain.

Case in point...Papoosekin has been sleeping in her swing for almost two hours so far this morning, so that's already an improvement as she hasn't had her what-used-to-be-usual morning nap in at least a week.

It'll be at least a week before I can post again, so stay tuned!