in which i trash talk my kids

My children are crappy sleepers.  My husband and I are also pretty awful sleepers (he wakes up in the middle of the night to eat/wander/scare the shit out of me; I have never had a normal night's sleep without Ambien CR).  I often wonder whether shitty sleeping is genetic or whether it's just that since Scott and I have no idea how to make ourselves sleep we're poorly equipped to help the little ones.

At night, when we peek into Joseph's room we never know what kind of freaky shit we'll find.  Will he be passed out on the storage bench like some kind of vagrant at a bus stop?  Will he be naked from the waist down?  Will he be sprawled on the floor while his trucks are cozily tucked in his bed?  He often wakes up in the middle of the night screaming about sharks and robots.  It takes him hours of babbling and playing to fall asleep. He almost never sleeps past dawn.

Harry isn't actually a horrible sleeper.  He still wakes up to nurse 100,000,000omg000,000wtf times a night, which might be a bit much for an eight month old, but that's relatively manageable.  It doesn't take anything especially heroic to get him to fall back asleep and he actually takes two fairly predictable naps a day.  In this family, he's a sleeping prodigy.

Violet, however, is a mystery.  She only naps in the car or in somebody's lap, which means she barely naps at all.  She will take cat naps in a sling but wakes up when she hears so much as a peep from either of her brothers.  Transferring her to a flat surface is fraught with peril; if she wakes up, her (loudly voiced) feelings of outrage and betrayal will keep her awake for hours.  At night she wants to sleep on my stomach with her head embedded in my neck and her fingers in my eye sockets.  I believe that she would be a happier, less needy baby (and that I would be a happier, less insane mother) if she would get more sleep, but I can't figure out how to make that happen without selling the boys or chaining them to a fence or something so that Violet and I can cuddle all day.

All of this is to say:  I'm so damn tired.  I was hoping that this twin parenting gig would be less stressful by this point, but it most definitely is not.  There is always somebody who is not happy.  There is always something that should have been done already.  Sigh.