Yesterday morning I sat down to update my status on Facebook and I erased what I wrote, because all I could think to say was: I'm tired. I feel like everywhere I go lately I'm sounding like a broken record. My conversations with family and friends are the same ("how AM I? I'm tired, that's how I am") every day it seems, and I can't even twitter anymore because I'm too tired to come up with creative ways to say--in 140 characters or less--how overwhelmed I feel lately.

Sleep deprivation is the pits, it really is.

I'm someone who normally has no problem sleeping. As soon as my head hits the pillow, I'm out like a light and don't wake up until my alarm blares the next morning. However, as I lay awake last night unable to drift off, I began to wonder why I've been having trouble sleeping lately. Funny enough, I had read an article in a magazine that same day that said more and more young adults are having the very same problem.

I haven't written anything about this, for fear of jinxing things, but for weeks now T. has been going to sleep by herself in her bed! She is still waking up every few nights to come running into bed with us, but I am no longer lying down with her until she sleeps, disengaging myself from the choke hold she has on my neck--even in sleep--and tiptoeing out of her room. I have those mixed feelings about this, although I thought I would feel more teary and nostalgic about this new milestone.

Remember how my T. likes to pitter-patter into our room at night and climb into bed with us? Well, for the past three nights she hasn't done this. She's stayed in her own room, curled into her pink sheets, her favorite stuffed dog, Lucky, clutched in her arms. I know this seems like a strange milestone to most of you, who probably have had kids sleeping through the night since they were tiny babies. But for us, this is big. We're a flexible (creative? lax? attachment-parenting?) sleeping family and, aside from the one painful night T.

Remember those behavior/responsibility charts from last week? My kids did it! T. dutifully stumbled off to the potty every night when she woke up to come into bed with us. Granted, I did have to prop myself up on one elbow almost every night, gaze at her bleary-eyed in the dark, and remind her to run back to the potty, but she did. Every night. And L. managed to make it through six nights without crawling into bed with us.