24 July 2008

The Wife: 2--The Boy: 2

And, we are NOT calling it a draw.

The Boy managed to sleep through the Guantanamo hours again today (he did so on Monday as well), in spite of a doctor's appointment and visiting friends--which means that I'll likely be up around 2am again tonight, if you're around, give me a call--we'll be up.

This is the Boy, circa 6:45pm:

I'm doomed.

So the score as it stands for this week is The Wife: 2 days of successfully keeping him awake and getting him to sleep in 3-4 hour chunks at night. The Boy: 2 days of successfully sleeping through the Guantanamo hours and staying up in the wee hours of the night just looking cute and annoying his poor, sleep deprived mother in general.

I am not giving up. Tonight's wee hours will feature yet another lecture on the values of being awake during the day and sleeping at night and how we do not live in a vampiric society but rather a human society which highly values night-time sleep.

In other news, the boy is squarely in the 50th percentile for weight gain. He's just up above his birth weight which makes the Husband ridiculously happy--myself, I'm just relieved that in spite of the long recovery things are going well. Excepting the day--night switching bit.

And since I have been mocking the odd bits of parenting in the last few posts I present you with my favorite parenting moment:

I get up with him at night. Almost exclusively. I figure the Husband has to get up early and get to his internship and he's there all day 3 days a week and is on half days the other 2 days where I stay home with the Boy and theoretically can sleep when he sleeps (this doesn't happen very often in reality, but it's a possibility). So I get up with him from midnight on until 7ish when the Husband hands him to me in bed for that first feeding of the day. Oddly enough, my favorite moments are those 3am feedings. When I was pregnant I would often be up at 3am to use the bathroom and climbing back in to bed the Boy would wake up and kick kick kick against my belly. Granted, some nights were wretched with the heartburn and the acid and nausea, but then there were other nights when it was just me and him inside me and a part of me, and it was a moment that was just ours and no one else's.

Now it's the same. We get up at 3am and he nuzzles in to me and he's so soft and squishy and I hold him close and it's just him and me in the dark and the quiet, me giving nourishment and him giving warmth and comfort and reminding me that in spite of its current squashy, state, my body is a powerful thing because it created this amazing little person with his miniature fingers and toes, with his tiny shell-shaped ears and long-fringed eyelashes. I stare at his tiny face trying to memorize the details of these moments because I know that it can all fade in a moment and he will be big big bigger and then one day he will grow up and leave home and love some one else much, much more than he loves me and the Husband. And that is all as it should be. But for now, in this moment, he's mine. I'm just grateful I can be awake for it.

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3 Comments:

At July 25, 2008 at 12:41 AM , Anonymous Whimsy said...

This is lovely. You were saying on the phone that you couldn't put it into words, but you did just that. Beautiful.

 
At July 25, 2008 at 9:46 AM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

He really is a cute baby. Thanks for posting his pix. Ready for 5 cousins from the SAV to come visit?

 
At July 25, 2008 at 8:36 PM , Anonymous Katrina said...

So I'm touched. This was beautiful.

 

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