It's all relative

Last night was rough!  Boston woke up a couple times (darn teething) and then woke up for good at 6 am and hasn't been back to sleep since.  I feel like death.  My head is spinning and I'm achy and in the most horrible mood imaginable.  In addition I spent half the night/morning praying God would take over my parenting duties and rock my child to sleep for me.  Seemed reasonable at the time, but now leaves me wondering if the Lord didn't find that a bit humorous (tell me you've done the same thing before right?  I'm not alone)? 


As I sit here, blogging, sulking, listening to my child scream from his bedroom (because that's what I've finally resigned myself to after hours of rocking, feeding, diaper changing, walking, playing, etc...) I remember back to the sleepless nights of Boston's newborn stage (who am I kidding? That lasted till he was like 9 months old).  But in the beginning it was definitely the worst.  He woke every couple hours, in fact due to dehydration and lack of milk on my part we weren't allowed to let him sleep past 3 hours until he was around 3 months old.  Those first days of no sleep or interrupted sleep were torture, but then we adjusted and found our groove (sort of).  I remember my first night of getting only 4 hours of sleep was amazing!  I thought I could run a marathon after that.  I remember thinking, "Why did I ever think I needed so much sleep?  If I can just get 4 hours of sleep in a row I can survive and I will be soooooooo grateful".  But gone are those days of sleep torture and we now expect Boston to sleep solid for 12 hours straight from the moment we lay him in bed.  We-PAUSE!  The thought just occurred to me to give Boss some tylenol...be right back!

I'm back.  So as I was saying we're now used to full nights of sleep, so on these rare occasions when Boss does wake up multiple times in the night, or even just once, I feel like I've been hit over the head with a sledge hammer.  I could NEVER complain about this to any Mom of a newborn...she would probably slap me (I know I would of).  However this all brings me to the thought that our trials/difficulties/challenges/whatever we "go through" are all relative.  They're relative to our experience, to our stage of life...just relative to us!

So some people compare and say, "Oh you have NO idea what hard is" and some people forget what it's like to be in your shoes and say, "Oh just wait till you have 3 kids, I'll show you hard, or "wait till your my age, your problems will seem so insignificant then" but I say, "Hard is hard.  Plain and simple.  It's all relative".

I have to say I owe this thinking to my Mom.  She never makes anyone feel like what they're going through is insignificant or not difficult and from the time I was little she took every one of my challenges or hard times very seriously and she's certainly someone that could say, "You don't know hard, I'll tell you all about hard" but she doesn't.  And I love that about her.

PS When you're a parent don't go to bed at 2 a.m.  Ever.  Even if you AND your husband can't put down the book your reading.  Don't ever go to bed at 2 a.m. 

PSS I love Tylenol...and the renewed energy (thanks to this here blogy) to attempt rocking him one more time.  :) 

This is from a road trip I took before I was married, with my sister and her kids.  I was amazed at how exhausted I was after a couple sleepless nights, so I had to document my haggardness.  All I can say after having a baby is I've looked MUCH worse than this!