ZZZZZZ

Before having children I had no idea what sleep deprivation was. I might have tried to convince you that I slept bad and really needed a nap, but I was just being dramatic.  Obviously having 2 kids and going through the whole newborn experience gave me a new perspective. We survived though and I'm glad I'm not waking up every 2 hours to nurse and change a diaper. What we are dealing with now is something called "night waking". It's a symptom of autism that many exhibit where the child has trouble going to sleep or staying asleep. The cause is not known, although there are some theories that there might be a disturbance in melatonin production. We have had mixture of both, E-man started waking up randomly a few months ago. It will be a couple weeks of waking up around 2 or 3 in the morning and being wired, usually taking another couple of hours to fall back to sleep. Then we will have a few weeks of fairly normal sleep with the occasional early bird wake up call. Now LB is starting to do the same thing, taking over an hour to fall asleep or waking in the middle of the night.  When the crazy sleep cycles coincide, I start to get a little crazy. For example, last night LB woke up from 1am-3am and then E-man was up bright and early at 5:45am.  Sometimes I wonder if I should go to bed when they do but I really enjoy the time I get to spend with Martin just hanging out.  It feels like a constant struggle with some new problem to figure out. There are days when I'm doing great and feel like I have a handle on it. Then there are days it feels like I'm just barely hanging on. What I'm realizing is that this is a marathon, not a race. I've got to keep my steady pace to keep it all going. So the plan for now it to keep moving, one foot in front of the other. I don't care how long it takes or how exhausted I am, I'm going to keep fighting.