Coughing, and other sleep problems...

Hank is (unhappily) medicated for his pink eye, but coughing. I'm now...coughing. And decidedly unhappy about it. It's a problematic cycle of coughing when you have kids. First, they get sick more often than we do, but then pass germs to us, so we're now sick as often as them. And then we're either coughing, or being woken by them coughing. It's terrible. I swear it, when I had Hank, I had no idea I'd never sleep normally again :( If babies came home from the hospital trained to sleep 8 hours through the night, I'd already have another child. Or at the very least, if they were like kittens with litter, and after a 6 week training period, could sleep 8 hours though the night.

There are women who tell me that their 6 week old baby slept through the night with no problems. Whenever someone tells me this, I secretly envision binding and gagging them, and forcing them to sleep in my house for a year. And perhaps putting bats in the room with them. And fire ants. A lot of the time though, women who tell me this have an empty nest and haven't handled 24-hour baby care in twenty years. I call it "grandmother brain." Here's a sampling:

"My daughter slept through the night at 4 weeks old. I gave her cereal in her bottle to accomplish this. If you want your baby to sleep, you must do this too."

"Henry still isn't sleeping well at 6 months old? You might be catering to him too much."

"It's the breastfeeding. That's why I didn't do that."

"He's so active, I can never take my eyes off him. You girls were never like this. You used to play in your playpen for *hours* up until you went to kidnergarten." This egregious example is from my own mother. This is grandmother brain at it's worst. We stayed quietly in playpens for extended periods of time until we were 5 years old? What did she do, sedate us?

Anyway, now Hank and I are both coughing, which means my sleep deprivation factor is now multipled by two. I'm certain that Mike is next. It's like a vicious fungus.