So sleep deprived. Haven’t slept a full night since last Tuesday. Seriously pretty sure I fell asleep at a stoplight today. Had a micronap, which is not nearly as cute as a micropig.

Since her amputation surgery, I have been sleeping with her leashed to me, in bed with us as usual because we figured she’d be most comfortable there. She is tethered to me so I can feel her every move. We can’t have her trying to get up and off the bed by herself in the middle of the night, or licking at her incision or port (which thankfully she has not been doing at all so far). Since I am the lightest sleeper and the most likely to notice her movements, I get the leash. Which wouldn’t the first time. 😉 And to that the alarm going off 3 times a night for administration of meds…. I don’t mind, truly. Though my body does. I can now more adequately identify with my friends who’ve survived newborn-dom. The sleep deprivation is brutal. Coherent sentence formulation is one of the first things to go. I think I sometimes have a micronap somewhere between the subject and predicate. Again, not cute. And I took a shower today that lasted twice as long as usual (my apologies, fellow Californians) because I couldn’t remember which bottle was shampoo…even though it proudly wears its name on the bottle. And my typically automatic routine had nothing automatic about it—like I have to form a committee before being able to execute each step in the process: “What’s next? Maybe conditioner? Or should be stand a little longer under the stream and take a micronap first?”

I do not mind, though. Anything for my baby girl Bristow.

The first night of sleeplessness followed finding out she had cancer and needed urgent surgery. We sobbingly left her at the vet hospital to await amputation surgery–Michael barely able to drive, me proposing perhaps we should pull over. We got home and grabbed the bottle of wine we had opened earlier (You see, we had very different plans for the evening–ones that involved wine and no tears and perhaps a little Mommy-Daddy alone time with the dogs shut out of the bedroom.), picked up our guitars, and dove into an evening of music and drinking and crying and reminiscing and praying. It was intimate–just not in the way we had planned. And it was, for all the heartache and tears, a beautiful mess of a night. A night that lasted until 3AM when we called our early-rising, recently-moved, (former) dog-co-parenting friends in Iowa to share the news. And then we prayed and wept some more. Soon after, Michael drifted off to sleep. I joined him a hour or 2 later, only to awake a couple hours post. And the wakeful sleepwalking has only increased since. “The Walking Dead” has nothing on us.