Napping

I took what I intended to be a brief nap this afternoon and woke up four hours later, which means that Edith spent half the day with her Grammy. Whenever that happens, I am typically informed of some change in Edith’s routine that horrifies me, my parents’ generation having a much more laissez-faire approach to parenting than our current helicopter ways.

(A frequent conversation snippet in our house:

Mom: “Well, you turned out great!”

Me: “No! No, I really did not!”)

Today, it was that Edith just really didn’t feel like napping and so had slept a grand total of ten minutes, which means that my four-month-old went from seven this morning to 6:30 this evening with only an hour and ten minutes of napping total. This seems impossible! And yet!

“She didn’t nap at all?” I said, hyperventilating, as I received this news.

Mom, lightly, “Sleepless wonder, that one!”

Meanwhile, I slept much more than I intended to sleep, because ever since Edith coopted my bed, I have been sleeping very poorly, as she likes to dance throughout the night and she wants to do it on me. In my sleep, I sort of compress her into a ball and hold her arms and legs, and that works for awhile, but eventually she breaks free and starts celebrating again, or I will sleepily lift and place her all the way across the bed, but she manages to migrate her way back under my armpit and thrash against my ribcage once more, as well as pat me on the face and stick her fingers up my nose.

This morning when I eventually gave in to what had for sometime been a background noise of constant joyful squawks unto the lord, and opened my eyes, she was on her tummy and propped up on her little arms, with her face hovering just above mine, staring at me in excited anticipation, eyes wide, and as I came reluctantly to life, she broke into a tremendous grin. “It’s six am, you absolute nightmare!” I moaned.

Delighted laughter.

I don’t know, she’s so fucking cute and I love cuddling her and I can’t resist her darling little face, and ALSO she is absolutely killing me, I’m losing my mind from exhaustion.

I realize that 9/10 of my parenting related blog posts are about my sleeping arrangements, and it increasingly seems to me that this is primarily what parenting is: they simply don’t sleep, and you have to, and this is the main locus of all parenting difficulty until they become teenagers, at which point, they sleep every minute that they aren’t doing drugs or having unprotected sex with idiots.

Why do we do this to ourselves?