Annoying

Guh. There's nothing quite so annoying as having the alarm set for 6:45 and being woken up by your three-year-old at 5:45. Damn kids. (Okay, damn kids that I love dearly, even at 5:45 AM.)

Speaking of sleep, I have twins. What do the two have in common? Well, in the first few months after the twins were born, the two appeared to be mutually exclusive. If you want to know what stress is, try feeding one twin while the other is crying to be fed when you're a few weeks' short of sleep and trying to keep everyone quiet so your wife can get a few hours of sleep in the other room.

My wife had stopped working when we had kids, so I was the one who had to get up in the morning to go to work. She tried for a week or so to handle the night shift on her own, but that simply resulted in her not getting any sleep for a week or so. After that, I started getting up at 3AM so she could maybe get a couple of hours of uninterrupted sleep before I left for work. This made things a little better, but after about a month of this, we broke down and got someone to come in to do the night shift. It was really frigging expensive, but we were pretty desperate at that point.

As an example of how desperate we were: my wife is quintessential mama bear, very protective of her children. Under normal circumstances, she would have needed a lot of time to develop the trust in someone necessary to leave her children in their care. The first night we had a night nurse, my wife was in bed about five minutes after the doorbell rang.