Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Thanks Giving Oliver and I have this dance we do in the morning. R wakes up at 5:30 am (yikes!) for work, and goes to take a shower while O and I stay in bed. He's almost always asleep, and almost always trying to turn over onto his stomach in his sleep. If he's successful, he wakes up, and the day begins. So my job is to keep him asleep. (My greedy personal stake, of course, is staying in bed and keeping my eyes closed for just a few more minutes.) So I scootch over, right up next to Oliver's little body. His head is just below my chin: his feet are down just below my waist. (I hope every day for him not to kick his legs suddenly.) He lays on his side, facing me. R gets the privilege of sleeping next to Oliver for half of the night. It's a mixed blessing: she also has to wake up when he does, sometimes once every two hours, to feed him. But she has this time with him, and she has moments in the dead of night that I will never ever have. I can't feed him in the middle of the night realistically - with Mom, he eats and goe back to sleep relatively painlessly. If I tried to feed him, even to allow R to sleep more, I'd have to pick up Oliver, bring him to the kitchen, pull a bottle out of the fridge, warm it up under the hot water tap, pour it into a bottle, feed him, and by then he'll be fully awake. then I'd have to spend somewhere between ten and thirty minutes on the dreaded bouncy ball (more on this later), bouncing him back to sleep. Then I have to try to ease him into the cosleeper without waking up, which only works sometimes. So R feeds him at night. That's how it is. But back to the morning. Sometimes I'm a very very lucky man, and Oliver just sleeps. We doze, chest to chest, and sometimes his hand will be pressed up against my chest as we sleep. These are the days that I slip easily back to sleep, and R surprises me when she comes back into the bedroom, towel wrapped around her hair. Sometimes it doesn't go quite so well, and he struggles to stay asleep. He fights to complete his roll onto his tummy, and I have to press my chest flush against him, bracing him on his side. His fingers scrabble for a handhold against my bare chest, tickling me, once startling me by grabbing my nipple. He rocks back and forth, back and forth, trying to rotate just a little farther every time, and sometimes during this effort he dozes off between efforts. I sit and stare at his beautiful eyelids, at the tiny quiver of his lips and the almost invisible movement of his lips as breaths slip out and in. And he wakes again, tries one more time to topple himself over, tries and fails as Daddy silently body-checks him. These are my favorite moments of the day. He's barely awake at these times, and I can just soak him in without worrying about such distractions as feeding or playing. I love feeling his chubby thighs press against my stomach as he sleeps. I sneak kisses while he sleeps, and smell his forehead and feel the wispy downy-soft hairs on his head. He is in his purest, most elemental state. Eventually, inevitably, he wakes up. He opens his eyes, trying to see where he is and who he's laying against. His eyes meet mine. I look into the eyes of my son, and he stare at each other, belly to belly, chest to chest. Sometimes he reaches a hand out and finds one of my (comparatively) giant-size fingers, squeezes it. And we begin the dance of the day. We spend many hours together, playing, laughing, feeding, but I feel like I never have clearer communication than when we're laying next to each other in bed, eyes locked, each of us searching to find out what the other is thinking. A happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. Be grateful for what you have. The Universe is not always kind, but sometimes, if we are lucky, if Fate smiles on us, we get exactly the thing we desire most. 8:55:09 PM     Speak up!  []