sleep deprivation

I am so tired of not being able to sleep at night. I go to bed exhausted every night thinking, "I will fall asleep tonight. Tonight is the night," only to toss and turn for almost the entire duration of the night. I can manage a stretch of about 2 hours of sleep before I'm awake again. I've tried pillows, the recliner, the couch, staring at the ceiling or wall until I can no longer keep my eyes open, and nothing works. By the time I finally do manage to drift off to a good sleep, Josh's alarm is going off and Aidan is up and ready to start his day. I'm so tired in the mornings, I can barely function, so I resort to Dora, Diego, and Pablo and friends (yes, they do come on in that order. Wonderful scheduling in my opinion) while I snooze on the couch for a bit longer. Might I add that this makes me feel like a horrible mother on top of it all. I should be playing with my son, not sitting him in front of the tv so I can sleep, so I spend a lot of my days feeling guilty about this. And if I hear that this is just getting me ready for sleepless nights with a newborn one more time, I'm going to scream. That's baloney. I know what it's like to have a newborn. I've had one. Right now, I have a 2 year old, and I need to sleep nightly in order to prepare for him on a daily basis. He doesn't slow down. I still have 2 months before I need to worry about newborn nights. I think I'm about to resort to my leftover ambien from my pregnancy with Aidan. I've been trying to avoid it, but I think I've reached my limit.

My back is also killing me. While I'm snoozing on the couch in the mornings, I have a heating pad against my back. I've never been in so much pain in my life. I know it's because I'm moving around with Aidan as well as picking him up, but still it could go away. The other day, I had a cramp like pain that started on the left side of my lower back, wrapped around the underside of my belly, and shot down my left thigh. It literally brought me to tears. Josh thought he would help by having me stand up. Big mistake. That severely intensified the pain. It didn't last very long. Once I was on my feet, it pretty much went away, so maybe standing was the solution. Aidan was very concerned though. Josh had to keep telling him that Mommy is ok. On a good note, my feet are great! No swelling this time around.

Enough about my pregnancy woes. On a positive side, I saw my doctor again last Wednesday, and he said Levi is perfectly fine and there's no need to worry about his size (although he is measuring a bit big) or to start thinking about scheduling a delivery date yet. That was reassuring news.