"I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are? " - Thoreau

June 26, 2008

I've developed a strange problem in the past few weeks: I've become a zombie co-sleeper.

Everything starts off fine. I fall asleep in my own bed. But sometime in the night something happens, and every morning for almost two weeks I've woken up snuggled up with my son in his bed. The strange part is that many mornings I don't remember what woke me or remember getting up and moving. Not at all.

What probably happens is that E wakes up sometime in the night and calls for me. He used to cry, but over time he's realized that if he's awake in the night he can just call out "mamma, mamma" and I'll hear him and come in. Typically the reason he's awake is that he's kicked off all his covers or has flopped over so he's sideways on the bed, and now he's cold, so the easiest thing to do is to snuggle under the covers with him until I doze off. But more mornings than not, now, I wake up in his bed with no memory at all of how I arrived there. This morning I woke up at 4:45 am in his bed, no idea how I'd arrived there, and thought "this is dumb. I'm going back to my own bed." and so got up and slept for the next hour and a half or so in my own bed, next to my husband.

I woke up when E woke up at 6:30 am and cried out "Where mamma?! Where mamma?!"

I guess I don't really mind this odd routine. E clearly likes waking up next to me (I often get kisses and hugs when waking up), and my husband doesn't really mind. I do find it strange, however, that I don't remember it. I almost see it as some sort of weird reversal of the way we often move sleeping children around - they fall asleep in one spot and wake up in a totally different one.

I'm pretty sure no one is carrying me into his room, however. At least I hope not.

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