Sleep Is For Wusses

The past few weeks have been exhausting. So exhausting, in fact that I haven’t felt like writing at all. Stella is back to her old tricks, awake all night, and only soothed when Randi sticks a boob in her face. Except now she’s developed a new wrinkle to her repertoire, which is that she then lets the boob fall out of her mouth and wriggles and fights until Randi puts it back in. And thusly we’ve spent many of the past several nights.

I would like to believe it’s not the vaccinations. But the fact is, this baby slept a lot better before we gave her the shots. Before the shots she was on a lovely sleep schedule, sleeping some nights six hours in a row, and napping at regular intervals during the day.

No more. With few interruptions she now sleeps at most a couple of hours during the night, wakes up all the time, cries and only sleeps when Randi boobifies her. Repeat this cycle six times a night and you have our lives.

Needless to say, this sucks. You can’t win. No shots, the baby can get a whole host of crapalicious diseases. Give shots and we fear we might’ve just permanently screwed up your lovely, darling daughter.

As stated before I am not a vaccination paranoid, but, and this is not a debate, our daughter was different before the shots. Now we have another round coming up. Needless to say, we’re thrilled.

It’s not all one way, though. She still smiles, she still loves, she still cuddles, she is not withdrawing into her own world, at all. She recognizes us, in all our foul, sleep-deprived moods, and smiles. This morning, for example, after torturing her mother all night we removed her from her swaddler only to see her stretch, yawn, and smile, fresh as a daisy. Christ, this kid really is Keith Richards.

And we’re quickly becoming Ron Wood, me and her mom, not able to keep up, worn out, and dating 18 year old Russian women. Whoa, okay, maybe not that last part, but you know what I mean.

To top it all off the damn Sleep Sheep ran out of batteries. So now Stella is denied the soothing sounds of humpback wales copulating off the coast of Cape Breton.

At work all people want to do is ask me how Stella is. I don’t know what to say other than everything’s okay, peachy keen. That’s all they want to hear anyway. So that’s what I tell them.

I hope this is all just a phase. The likelihood is simply that Stella is a high needs baby, and requires extra attention and love, like extra, extra attention and love. Like five extra servings of it. Good thing we are attention and love-giving people. Although I didn’t feel like much of one tonight.

Last night Randi, in a rare bout of sleep, dreamed Stella was a flopping fish. She dreamt this because our baby, even when she sleeps can’t sit still, and does The Worm all up and down her crib, flipping around like a bad break dancer. This kid does all this and smiles about it. I wish I could smile about it, but I’m just too tired.

I hope the next entry is more good natured, but this is life as we know it over here. Maybe it’ll change, maybe not. Stella is a true Brooklyn baby though. She sleeps through the loudest construction you can imagine, all day, and then is woken up when I open the door to her, I mean our, bedroom. I guess she doesn’t like it too quiet. It makes her cranky.