If You Love Someone, Let Them Go……To SLEEP!

To SLEEP! TO SLEEP!!!  GO TO SLEEP!!!  Dear baby love of mine, get off my boob for 5 minutes and let us both get some SLEEP!!!!

It has been a rough past three nights in our old parent, young child household.  Conor has a pretty bad cold and at night it’s causing him (and us) some amount of troubles.  Wednesday night, we brought him to bed around 1:30 and I swear to you he was on the boob every hour through the rest of the morning.  It was almost like he was back to his newborn nursing schedule, although as Dave pointed out, he wasn’t going to sleep between nursing.  My boobs were actually chapped on Thursday morning.

Last night, I simply could not take the on-off-on-off-on-off schedule in the Big Bed.  So I got up and went back his room and rocked and nursed him, fully expecting to be there for a while.  Two minutes into the nursing/rocking he was asleep and I deposited him in his crib with nary a whimper.  I thought we would be done for the night, but I had to repeat the process every hour and a half until 4:00 in which he slept soundly the rest of the night (morning). 

No, we don’t think this is going to be a new problem.  Yes, we do think this cold is bothering him and waking him up.  Our first clue that the cold is the culprit was the humongous coughes and sneezes that precede his wake ups.  We are shocked though at how quickly and soundly he’s sleeping in his crib compared to the bed.  Maybe this is the beginning of the end of the Big Bed.  I can see the plusses and the minuses to the end of the Big Bed.  But honestly, I can only see the plusses of a good night’s sleep tonight.

Katrina

The last time I blogged about Katrina, I said that every morning when I woke up to NPR, I learned of another bad thing that I wasn’t expecting.  What amazes me is that it’s still happening.  This mornings overwhelmingly sad fact is that they now believe a 20 foot wave breached the levy at the 9th Ward/St. Bernard’s Parish.  There’s no way that levy could have protected them from that wave.  ((((sigh)))))

And yes, I’m getting angry at all the mistakes made at all levels of the government in responding to the hurricane.  And yes, Charlotte has taken in some evacuees.  And yes, UNC Charlotte has enrolled students from the schools down there.  And yes, state employees have been ordered to stop all non-essential travel to save gas, which I take to mean I should work at home in my office as much as possible.  This hurricane is still very much in my day to day experience, which I have to say, surprises me. 

Another surprising outcome of this hurricane is the media’s shock over seeing poor people.  Wow.  Do most people in this country not know and/or hang around “poor people?”  If you ever want to see some “poor people”, please feel free to go on a run with me around my neighborhood.  Or ride with me on my commute from home to campus.  If that doesn’t appeal to you, then let me introduce you to a few branches of my family tree.  I’m not trying to be coy;  I’m honestly surprised of the reports on the news that “Mainstream America” is shocked by the poverty in the United States.  If that really is true, then I’m even more grateful that I live in the neighborhood that I do and my extended family is who it is.  Honestly, though, I don’t think that poverty is that surprising to most people.  I think we all recognize someone from our family or our neighborhood from those horrible pictures and heartbreaking stories.  At least, I hope so. 

9:22:49 AM