Sleep
You win some, you lose some. Thankfully, sleep is not a race. I would lose every.single.night. because I am not a good sleeper, for lots of reasons. But that is a post for another day. The CDC says that 1 in 3 Americans don't get enough sleep. Parenting solo with my husband working in Iraq means that I don't fully relax and it's particularly difficult when one of the kids are sick.
Living Room Campout
Cue to this last week with a sick baby and being sick myself. I recovered quickly, within 30 hours or so. The body aches, pains and chills were killer, and I thank my lucky stars that my nausea only lasted from 10:30 to 6am, because no mom needs to deal with that while trying to get kids ready for school. The baby was the first one sick and I had the foresight to build a living room campout. This made it easier to deal with catching baby hurl and not remake the bed every hour. Fast-forward a week and one child hasn't been sick at all and the other is still recovering. We haven't been to the gym because I can't imagine letting anyone else deal with the diapers and I don't want the germs to spread. Maybe the flu vaccine helped me to not experience all the same symptoms but I was spared most of his symptoms and our daughter hasn't been sick at all (she's kind of a unicorn, but that is for another day).
But here we are a week later and he's nursing for probably 90% of his nourishment and eating a few bites here and there for the rest. He'd probably recover more quickly if he'd stop drinking his bath water (and yes, I clean it after each of his baths, but still....). Here I am, I got out of bed after only 5 hours of being in it because he wanted to be attached and I really want him to have some rest so that we don't slip into a cycle of him trying to catch up during the day only to not sleep come evening. So here I am overachieving in the sleepless crowd. But I take it in stride and will try to keep him to his daily schedule (except the gym, because diapers) so that he'll hopefully have a very restful evening.
