1:56am

This is my second night making the twins go four hours between feedings. In the sober light of day (and perhaps this is why sobriety is so overrated), it made sense to say, "surely chunky 8 month olds do not need to eat every 45 minutes at night." It is in everyone's best interest for them to learn to sleep, and I have tried everything except really committing to letting them cry. I have read possibly every word in the English language ever written on making demons babies sleep, and even the theories diametrically opposed to each other agree that consistency is key.

Last night, night one, wasn't that terrible. I fed them before I went to bed at 11. Boy twin woke up at 12:10 and screamed his head off for 30 minutes and then did go back to sleep until 3, when I fed them both. His sister took her turn screaming from 4:30-5, then they both got up at 7. Not terrible. Neither twin was noticeably emaciated in the morning (sadly, neither was I, but that's another issue), and I had had two chunks of two hours of sleep, which enabled me to do puzzles with my son, clean the house a little, and make dinner. All in the same day!

I went to bed feeling foolishly optimistic. I kind of go to bed every night feeling foolishly optimistic, come to think of it - despite 244 consecutive nights of them not sleeping (that's the actual number, not an exaggeration, by the way), every night I think to myself that maybe this will be the night they realize that sleep is not out to get them, that it might be nice to have a mother they see outside visitation hours at the asylum, that there is no way in hell they need to eat again. Anyway, I had hope, because I am dumb. It must be like pregnancy amnesia - I have horrible-night-with-babies amnesia, which allows me to continue trying to survive the twins' infancy against all the evidence pointing to the unlikelihood of that survival.

I fed the little monsters darlings at 10:45 and went to bed. Because I am constantly tense from forcing myself to stay awake, I can never fall asleep quickly at bedtime (though I can nod off in seconds any other time, like while driving a car), and I fell asleep around 11:30. Boy twin started screaming at 12:45. It is now 2:13am and he's still at it, although he does take occasional 5-10 minute breaks to make sure I try to fall asleep again - it's most effective, apparently, when trying to break down your enemy emotionally, to not just keep them awake but to jerk them back up out of sleep repeatedly. Twins? The Supreme Court would like a word with you regarding the applicability of the Geneva Convention. I think I'm raising little Republicans, talk about insult to injury.

I'm going to go suffer the noise horizontally again for a while. I hate this sound more than anything - it makes my heart race and my stomach churn, I actually feel like throwing up. Why are my babies so awful???