Probaby grumpy and complaining sleep thoughts about twins, a short Evening in the Life, and some grumpy golden hours

I'm fairly sure I have sleep PTSD.  Now that we are a few days into twin bed transition, I have basically immediately reverted to sleep survival mode. This isn't fully necessary as current sleep is a lot better than newborn sleep, but sleep uncertainty is high now and I do not like it.  

It turns out, I now have an exceptionally strong "Sleep Uncertainty" mode, which instantly triggers the following sleep protective behaviours

• Cut out all evening socializing
• Go to bed as close to 8pm as possible
• Use work (childcare) hours for productive work only
• Sleep as long as possible in the mornings
• Lower all standards for house cleanliness
• Lower all standards for family food
• Delay all house/life maintenance hobbies, such as budgeting and photo albums

These things all took me a long time to embed when twins were born, but I now immediately jumped back into them and as a result, I am not sleep deprived.

I am very grumpy in other ways, and the house is yucky, and I don't know how I'm going to survive the 4 day weekend, and I really miss my (only newly rekindled) love of exercise.

The other newborn twin adaptive behavior I am good at is patience. Not in the immediate kind (I'm not good at being patient with the kids) but in the longer term kind.  I am telling myself that they will sleep again when they are 3 or 4, and I will only live like a joy-less sleep stressed and hobby-less human for a few months or years.  (also, I told you this post was complain-y right? I feel like using the word "joy-less" when talking about kid stuff is really harsh, because perhaps I should find joy through all this precious kid time, but I find joy through kid time when balanced with periods of non kid time)

Are these really good adaptive behaviours? Not too sure.  They certainly don't make me fun to be around right now.

Laura Vanderkam is working on a book about the "Golden Hours".  I like this premise.  In life, the "Golden Years" are the time after retirement and before death (I guess? That sounds morbid).  In the same way, everyday we get hours between Work and Sleep that should/could have the same golden quality.  

Here are my golden hours from yesterday

5:30 Finish Work
5:45 Pick up kids from after school, child A throws massive wobbler about how he wanted the other parent to pick him up.
6:00 Family dinner (pasta)
6:20 Clean up family dinner while kids play downstairs with Andy

6:50 kid with most transition difficulty struggles to transition out of games, go upstairs with said kid
7:00 Andy works on twin bedtime, I work on Lily bedtime (Pyjamas etc) and Lily has milk downstairs
7:20 Read stories to Lily, Andy works on twin bedtime
7:45 Lily goes to her bed, Andy works on twin bedtime
8:00 Say goodnight to Twins, Andy says goodnight to Lily
8:05 Say goodnight to Ezra
8:15 Twins awake and happy, I finish tidying downstairs and reply to some emails
8:40 Twins awake and unhappily yelling
8:45 Lily awake due to unhappy twins
8:50 Tell twins goodnight again
9:00 Try to plan week with Andy but fail because we are too tired
9:10 read in bed
9:30 Sleep

In 4 hours, we spent 2 hours actively putting kids to bed.  That is too many hours.  For reference, bedtimes used to run from 6:45 (twins) to 7:45 (Ezra) and I could usually leave the house at 7:30 if I wanted.

Perhaps there is a reason Laura is writing about golden hours now that her youngest is 5 years old. I will also have golden hours again, someday. 

Or maybe the 20 minutes of reading and 20 minutes of emails are the golden hours I should be looking for?  I guess that is 40 minutes of gold, amongst an otherwise rather tiring 3hr 20minutes.

For now, I'll just squeeze my golden hours into my 20 minute 6am morning coffee and blog post.