Life is Delicious

When you have a four-month-old baby, one of the most common questions people ask is, “Does s/he sleep through the night yet?” My answer to that is a maniacal laugh. Sammy didn’t sleep through the night until he was 15 months old, so I don’t have high hopes that Natalie will be any different. She doesn’t even consistently sleep the 5-hour stretch that the experts call “sleeping through the night” (and my night is a lot longer than 5 hours).

If she ever does sleep a long stretch, I always wake up in panic – OMG the baby hasn’t woken yet OMG SIDS OMG – just to hear her start crying 2 minutes later. I’m sure that has nothing to do with me poking at her and peering in her face to see if I can hear her breathing. I’m guessing maybe that is maybe why my babies don’t learn to sleep through the night for a long time - they’ve learned to expect a rude awakening if they sleep too long.

On Friday night, we moved Sammy into a twin bed. It was pretty much a non-event. The only thing that has changed is that instead of waking up to the sound of Sammy crying in his crib, begging to be sprung from jail, we’ve woken up the past three mornings to the quiet “click” of his door opening, followed by the proclamation, “I’m awake!”

Now the crib is available for Natalie, but I’m not ready to move her yet. There are pros and cons to having her in our room. It would be nice to turn the light on at night, so I could read awhile before going to sleep, but on the other hand – I really like my sleep. It’s so much easier to deal with her by reaching over than it is trekking across the hall to get her every time she wakes up. And I’ll miss hearing the small noises she makes as she sleeps. Or when she wakes up during the night, ready to play (like she did at 4:00 a.m. this morning). If anyone else woke me up at that ungodly hour, they’d hear about my displeasure – but listening to her laugh and chatter makes it impossible to be grouchy.