Tuesday, September 13, 2005

In the battle of wills, the loudest person may just win I went to bed early tonight. I almost never go to bed early. The hours between 9 p.m. and 5:30 or 6 a.m. are the time I get more or less to myself, with children sleeping and, often, the H working. It's when I surf the net, pay bills, read a book or just putter. I love it, and so, I often delay going to sleep until, oh, the hour when I'd go to sleep if I didn't have kids, somehwere around midnight. It's 1:43 a.m. as I type this, and I am, in fact, not a somnambulist blogger. The Little One is screaming. Let me emphasize screaming, and has been since about 11 p.m. At 11 p.m., having turned my lights out at 10 (and not being one of those people like the H, who can go immediately from waking to sleep) I was in the nether zone, where you don't feel asleep but your thoughts are odd and disconnected, and if you stop to ponder them, you realize contentedly that sleep is about to overtake you, because on the edge of sleep is the only time you'd be busy envisioning your house painted purple and moved to the desert. When she started tonight, the H had just come up from his office downstairs, and was watching some movie or other in the living room, decompressing from his day. I called to him; if he was awake anyway, it was only fair that he take over and try to get her back to sleep. He did, but whatever he did seems to have created (or maybe she was going to do this anyway) her worst night ever. At 12:30, he gave up and brought her to me (more or less asleep) in bed. I nursed her, calmed her down, and tried to put her in her crib. Not a popular plan. that was over an hour ago. I've tried pretty much everything except what I know she wants, 30 minutes of rocking and nursing in the rocking chair in her room. If I pick her up, she slumps against me and then hurtles her little body towards a horizontal position, head thrown back. This is her sign language for "get in bed with me and get out your boob. Now." It's sweet, actually, and I know I could get her to sleep if I nursed her. But lately, if I do that, she just wakes up an hour and a half or two hours later wanting to do it again. So I'm trying to be a little tougher. I go in there ever ten minutes or so, and rub her back, and talk to her, and give her her pacifier, and then she yells some more and I split for a while. I know she can fall asleep in her crib, because she's done it on and off most of her life. So instead, I'm sitting in my office typing, listening to her screaming on the monitor (did I mention screaming) and feeling like the meanest mommy ever. 1:51:02 AM     comment [] trackback []