"Pour down your warmth, great sun!" - Whitman

This morning, as many mornings, I woke up in E's bed with no memory of how I got there. I went to sleep in my own bed. I have a vague memory of moving him over to climb into his, but what prompted the move -- a cry, or just my own dreaming -- I have no idea.

We've all grown used to this. I'm sure at some point E will request that I don't co-sleep with him but that's long in the future. For now, he's joyfully snuggly when he wakes up and finds me there. I'm often awoken by kisses and hugs, or just a small warm cheek laid against my own cheek as he lays his head on my head. Sometimes, in the early morning hours when he's half-asleep and dreaming he will ask me things, and I will shush him, reassure him, which sends him back to sleep again.

I've realized slowly the reason this always felt right to me. I slept in the bed with my own mother until I was in elementary school. For her it wasn't a parenting choice -- we just lived in a two bedroom house with my grandparents: they had one room and I had the other. She worked nights, so often I would climb into my Grandmother's bed if I was sad or sick or lonely and fall asleep there. When I woke up in the morning I would be in my own bed with my mother beside me. We had a secret code between us, a hummed pattern that stood for the words "I love you" and I can remember resting my head against her back and humming it over and over until she woke up.

Humans are social, pack animals. We band together for safety reasons, and for social ones. For a long time I fought against my nocturnal wanderings, but I've come to accept and embrace them.

"Most glorious night! Thou wert not sent for slumber!" - Lord Byron

Have to say, I certainly had days when I wished I could hire a night nanny, not for every night but just for a night or two until I could get rested again:

(NY Times) Baby Cries at 2 A.M.? No Need to Get Up

Of course, my second thought was "what are these babies eating?" I'm sure many of them are being fed breast milk by bottle, but I also suspect that women with these "high pressure" professional jobs, as well educated about infant health as I'm sure they are, just aren't able to pump four or five times a day to provide milk for their babies.

As a working mother, night nursing (and snuggling) with my son was such a wonderful, close time time with him. It provided him with food, security, and close contact with me, and it gave me time to just gaze at him in wonder. Four a.m. in the half-light of dawn is always the way I'll see the infant E best in my mind's eye. He loved to wrap his tiny hands up in my hair before he went to sleep.

"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

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.

“Habit and routine have an unbelievable power to waste and destroy.” -- Henri de Lubac

For some crazy reason, last week, the week that had no format, no schedule, no routine, full of changes and adaptations every single day, that week went fine.

This week, the week where E is supposed to be "back on schedule" - back to daycare, back to his regular schedule, this week is a mess.

He's refusing to nap at daycare. He's hitting everyone (me, his father, the other kids at Daycare, Sarah), and sometimes does this thing where he turns into a writhing ball of flailing arms and legs, often lying on his back and kicking and holding a stuffed animal in each and flinging them around with wild abandon. He doesn't seem upset when he's in dervish mode - in fact, I think he's doing it because its fun - but its a little weird and scary to watch. I'm trying to chalk it up to being (almost) two, but his father voiced to me a concern yesterday that "maybe its something he's eating that makes him go crazy like that."

Perhaps. But this morning he woke up at five fifteen, raring to go, begging for milk - no, juice - no, milk - no, juice - Oh! the world is ending - Milk! Juice! Milk!, and then commenced to thrash around on the bed in this same wild way, rabbit in one hand, elephant in the other, kicking his legs and slamming the animals together. At five fifteen. In the morning.

I finally got him a drink and got him to snuggle in the bed with me, but he never fell back asleep. By seven fifteen he was up and dressed and ready to go, but rubbing his eyes and being grumpy and sleepy already. I don't envy Sarah for her day with him. We get a note back from her every day, outlining what he ate and how many diapers and what they did for the day, and on Monday the note said read "Tough day today. As M (one of the other toddlers) said "E was a wild man today."

I can't help but believe that he misses being at home.

This weekend we're going camping in Vermont. Four days of family and friends togetherness time. I wonder if, by Sunday or so, I'll have a different, sunnier boy on my hands. And I wonder if, come Tuesday or Thursday of next week, he'll be back to dervish mode again.

"The marathon can humble you" - Bill Rodgers

Today was one of those crazy 15 hour days I sometimes have, where I work both jobs and only get to see my baby awake for the first forty minutes or so of the entire day. It was his first day back at daycare after a week away, and the day our roofers arrived to tear our roof (and lawn. and driveway.) apart.

But, strangely, here at midnight, at the end of this marathon day I'm not nearly as tired as I was last night at 8pm when I fell asleep in the bed next to my baby boy.

Being a stay at home mom isn't something you just jump into. Were I to suddenly win the lottery and be able to stay at home from tomorrow on, I'm not sure I could physically handle it. I'm just not in shape. On the days -- the rare and beautiful days -- when I get to spend the entire day with my son, with no plans and no agenda, I feel as though I've been thrown headlong into a marathon without having ever run a step. My body aches. I'm tired - the bone tired of physical labor, but also the deeper tiredness that happens when you work your imagination all day. I've spent the day doing laundry and playing trucks and making lunch and being hyper vigilant, and by E's bedtime I'm a wreck - ready to lay down next to him and fall asleep, struggling to keep my eyes open until he shuts his for good. In some ways, working is the easy way out -- I get to do the fun stuff, the easy stuff, and someone else gets to do the more difficult and exhausing day-to-day grind of maintenance.

Last night I was waiting for his peed-on bedding to finish it time in the dryer, so we put him to bed in our bed as his father waited for the laundry to dry. E and I snuggled up, as we often do, and read books. But I kept yawning. I had to read the same page three times, because I kept yawning. Finally, E looked up at me, and patted my face, and said "night night, mamma, night night." He reached over and closed the book and laid his head on the pillow next to mine. And held my hand, as we both went to sleep.

"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."- W Edwards Demming

Things have been kind of dark here as of late, which doesn't really reflect the true mood either in my house or inside my head. So lets try to lighten up some.

Its been so beautiful here for the past week or so. We took E to the playground after work yesterday afternoon, but our visit had to be cut short .... due to poop. You'd think after all this time I would have learned to put an extra diaper or two in my bag or stashed in the car but I have not yet learned that lesson.

My son is totally in love with "The Tivo Guy" but when our Tivo broke and was replaced the old Tivo Guy startup animation was replaced with a new one. You would think the world had ended! So I asked some questions about restoring the old animation on the internet, and a very kind stranger from Washington state mailed Evan a stuffed Tivo guy. He adores it.

Because everything is better with pictures, here's a very short (about seven seconds) clip of E welcoming "the guy" into our home.



Last night, for the first time in ages, I woke up in my own bed and E woke up in his. I did have to go lay down with him for about an hour in the middle of the night, but I do view this as a big step towards actual and for real "sleeping through the night". Plus, he woke up at about 530 and called for me once, but I waited a minute or two and no second call ever came. When we got up at 630 he was fast asleep, and I had to wake him at five past seven by opening the shades in his room.

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things. - Melville

The Grandmother Dichotomy: While visiting at Easter, my mother scolded me for eating about 10 jellybeans over the course of three hours while giving my son a) jellybeans; b) not one but two marshmallow rabbits; and 3) a generous helping of cake.

Tonight’s Great Joy: I’m working tonight until 10 pm, so I called at bedtime and sang to my baby boy. Normally he’s not willing to put up with the phone for more than a minute or two, but while I was singing he was quiet and Josh told me afterwards he was smiling and laying his head on his pillow. When the song was done he chattered at me for a minute or two (something about cows, I think), then handed the phone to his father. I will remember to sing to him over the phone more often.

On Saturday, we did set up E’s new big boy bed, but not without some drama. You see, when we purchased the crib, and for, oh, some 20+ months thereafter I assumed that the crib converted to a twin size bed. Well, it does convert to a bed, but not a twin – a double bed. So we had to decide if it was easier to scrap the existing mattress and bedding we had for the twin, or if it was easier to scrap the existing full-size bed frame (formerly the crib) and buy a new twin frame for our existing mattress and bedding. In the end (and with a donation of a double mattress that Josh’s parents had in storage) we converted the crib to a double bed. So now my tiny boy is sleeping in a big bed all by himself.



We actually moved the mattress from our bed onto his bed, then used the new mattress on our bed, so his “new” bed is really the bed he’s been sleeping in with us since he was born. Having the double bed in there makes a lot of things easier – for instance, when he got cold and started squeaking at 445 am I was able to just go in his room, put him back under the covers and slip into bed beside him rather than what I would have formerly done, which was hoist him up, and bring him into our bed where the three of use would spend the next hour and a half jockeying for space.

But he’s so tiny in that enormous bed!

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen." - Steinbeck

Against my better judgment, we took E to the Mall to see the Easter Bunny last night. Of course, he freaked out and wanted nothing to do with it. Smart boy. I don't fully understand the whole "freaked out by Santa" thing, because even a mall Santa is still just a guy, with a human face and voice and form. The mall Bunny, on the other hand, was scary to me. Its head was far, far too large for the body wearing it, and it had these huge unblinking eyes, and a fairly scary mouth. I think he was wise not to go to near.

It was after 7pm when we got there, and the Bunny goes home at 8, so after we'd run a few errands we were able to return to the Bunny's enclosure, where E had a wonderful time running amok and pointing at all the rabbits in the decorative dioramas and yelling "a bunny! a bunny! a bunny! a bunny! a bunny!" over and over again at the top of his lungs. I left him with his dad for a few minutes to go buy some pants on clearance, and I could even hear him when I was deep at the back of the store. I suppose some parents would have been embarrassed by this, but I wasn't. The mall was virtually empty, and he was clearly having a great deal of fun.

Around 2am (I think) E woke up crying and fussing. Josh (bless him) got out of bed to go try and get him settled back into bed, but I kept hearing "mamma, mamma, mamma, mamma" in a more and more insistent tone, until I had to get up and reassure him that I was there, too.

The moment I appeared, the crying ceased. I sat with him for a bit, until I thought he was asleep, but when I got to the door it started all over again. When I came back over to the bed he latched onto my hand and tugged on me, so I crawled (remember, he's on a twin mattress on the floor right now) in next to him and he fell almost instantly asleep, snuggled up next to me and holding fast to my hand. We slept like that for a couple of hours, I think.

Its good to be wanted, even at 2 am.

A kiss without a hug is like a flower without the fragrance. ~Proverb

We need to take the crib down on Saturday without fail.

For the past several months, E has been sleeping on a mattress on the floor of his room, because he likes to climb out of his crib. We've been meaning to take the crib all the way down, but since the parts of the crib will convert into the frame for his twin bed, and we don't really have anywhere to store the frame pieces except in his room, it seemed safer to just leave the crib up while we figured out if E would routinely fall off the mattress and onto the floor. (Turns out he stays mostly on the mattress most of the time. Sometimes his head hangs over the edge, but I'm not really concerned about him tumbling out of bed.)

Last night, around 3 am, I awoke to crying. This is not unusual. E is not a good sleeper at the best of times. But last night he had turned himself 90 degrees (so he was sleeping across the mattress) and had managed to get his head underneath the crib. Then he whacked his head against the underside and woke himself up.

Well, since we had to get up in about three hours anyhow, I brought him into our bed (as I often do) to sleep for the rest of the night. Slowly the crying subsided as I rubbed his head, and he laid his head down on the pillow with a big sigh. I was sure he was asleep, but then he started wiggling. And wiggling. And the next thing I know he has slipped his little arm into the space between my neck and the pillow and has tucked his head under my chin, and is giving me the biggest, tightest, most snuggly hug I think I've ever gotten from him. (He's usually more of a lean-in hugger.) Then he disengaged and hugged his dad. Then me again. Then daddy again. Then he flipped over, put his feet on my pillow, and fell fast asleep.