fits & starts

'Sall good

This is going to be short because mama's tired.

I am almost through my first week of work. The first few days were brutal. Eeeeeeeeearly mornings, late nights, not getting a chance to see my boy, figuring out the new gig, being super tired...it was rough. But I figured if I powered through the first week I'd be okay.

The babysitter is working out great. She's warm and kind and good with H. It sure is hard, though, leaving your kid in someone else's hands, no matter how capable they seem. Also, since I've been home exclusively with him the last several months, it was hard to let go of our days together. Despite all the hard work that comes with being a parent, I absolutely love spending time with H. He is one of my most favorite people in the world and he makes me laugh like you wouldn't believe. So I miss my time with him. But he seems to be taking it all in stride.

Must sleep now.

Love means never having to say you're snotty...

The little guy has a cold again. Break out the Ayr and load up the humidifier, this one looks as potent as the last. There will be no more nose-suction thingy because it's just gross. And I'd hate to repeat past mistakes.

He woke us up at the ungodly hour of 5:20am today, crooning from his crib with nasally abandon. When he did not quiet, I decided to give him his morning bottle...and then put him back to sleep. Nuh-uh. The kid wanted to play. In the dark. Mr. Fits said, "Maybe he'll fall asleep if he lays in bed with us." At 6am that sounded really good, so we gave it a try. Baby, however, seized it as the perfect opportunity to hone his crawling technique. And to swat at my face. And pull my hair. And to rub some of his snotty goodness on our sheets.

He calmed down just enough for Mr. Fits to plant some kisses on his face, a tender moment in the darkness. After a few dozen kisses, H. looked at me and said, "Lady, try all you want, I am AWAKE. What part of me starting my day do you NOT get?!" Okay, he can't talk, but if he could, that's what he would have said. So we got up, shaking the last remnants of sleep out of our eyes.

And that's when it happened.

As soon as the lights went on, we realized the face we'd been kissing was covered with caked on snot. COVERED. It looked like someone basted him with egg whites, that's the glaze he was sporting. And it was in his hair. On his hands. Everywhere. You could say he was encrusted.

SnotBoy strikes again.

SnoozeFest 05

We'll never sleep/
God knows we'll try
...And how long will it take/
Before we go insane?
--Rilo Kiley

Wouldn't it figure that as soon as the baby learned how to sleep through the night, our dog would unlearn it?

(The answer is, Yes, yes it would.)

Night before last, after the butter cookie episode, I awoke to the pitter-patter of overgrown dog nails in the hallway. 5:15am. Since the J-man is prone to seizures, I got out of bed to see what was up. I found him sitting there, shaking, cowering, giving me the, "And the worst thing is, I did this to myself" look with those big brown eyes. He threw up twice and I caught it with a newspaper. I was awfully proud of how I headed off a potentially messy and disgusting situation. And then I noticed it: a huge pool of butter-cookie colored vomit. Smelled like vanilla. Not how I want to remember vanilla. Okay, I thought, I could manage that. Until I saw the other, even bigger mound. And then I realized we had just run out of paper towels. Let's just say I used every disposable cleaning product in the house to get rid of the dog's puke. I wasn't even mad at him by that point. I thought he'd already been punished enough, what with his insides all on the outside.

Baby slept. Daddy slept. My head hit the pillow again at 5:50am. Baby woke at 6:40. Daddy woke. And they let me sleep in.

And then there was last night. After a rough time of getting baby to bed, he was finally down for the count. We decided to go to bed early. Very early. (10:30, if you must know.) And we were sleeping blissfully. Until.

Enter naughty beagle. Came all the way 'round to my side of the bed at 1am. Put his paws up and swatted me. Went to the other side to wake up Mr. Fits. And then just sat there, at the foot of the bed, his tail wagging. This is could only mean one thing: he needed to go out. This happens maybe once a year, which should have made us feel better, but going out to walk a dog in Brooklyn at 1am when it's freezing cold and this was going to be your first full, good night of sleep--sweet, sweet sleep--since November and you know that whatever is going to come out of him will have the distinct stench of butter and vanilla--it's impossible to take solace in the fact he never usually needs a walk at that hour. Mr. Fits took him out and got the job done.

So there you have it. A baby who maybe sleeps through the night, a beagle who has decided not to sleep through the night (canine sleep training anyone?), and two exhausted adults who never get to sleep through the night.

Would I change a thing? You betcha. And here it is: I will never, EVER leave anything edible within paw's reach when I go out. Even if there's a zero percent chance he can get to it and open it, I will not even take a zero percent chance (is that a double negative?).

And I will probably never feel quite the same way about vanilla again.

If That's Not Irony, I Don't Know What Is

One of the first shirts we bought for H. was a light blue number from Old Navy that says BORN TO SLEEP. On it is a yellow winking moon, which I know for a fact was mocking me every time he's worn it and DID NOT SLEEP A WINK. We bought the onesie the day we got our travel call and panicked because we thought we didn't have enough clothes for the boy. After work, we ran in the pouring rain to The Gap in Times Square, bought a shitload of baby clothes and then booked it to Old Navy to buy more. We thought it was really cute and we estimated that it would fit the baby we'd yet to meet. Little did we know it would turn out to be an anti-self-fulfilling prophecy.

It's not that he's a horrible sleeper. He's just what I'd call sub-par. Except he's generally a good napper, so I'm sure in his tiny mind, one cancels out the other. This morning, while wearing his BORN TO SLEEP shirt, he took the kind of nap they write about in sleep books. It was wonderful. It was epic. It looked like this:

Yes, he's sleeping face down with his face pressed into the bumper. Yes, he's pulling the bumper down with his left hand. Yes, that's Fluffles, a soft plush lambie to his right. Yes, these are all things that are not supposed to be happening in your baby's crib. BUT, if I disturbed the environment that facilitated the most perfect nap in the world, I'd have woken him up. And you really can't do that to someone who was born to sleep.