Dozing with a Giant

He starts out in his crib at 8:30 pm, and I spend the next 2 hours doing stuff when I should probably be sleeping, but when else am I going to catch up on my (fillintheblank)?  Then I lay down, and am just drifting off, and I hear him crying from his room.  My stomach always drops out when I hear his cry this early, because I know it means a long night ahead.  I stumble in there, stepping on poor snoozing Virgil, and clumsily hoist my child into my fumbling arms, and pat his back.  I lay him down in the guest bed with me, I nurse him, and hold his hands, run my fingers over his fingers, marvel at him all over again.  He drifts off, and I drift off, and we lay like that for an hour or so, when he is stirring again.  Crying a sad listless cry, a cry of pain rather than hunger.  He rubs my tummy with his hands.  He likes to feel me there, next to him.  He talks to me, in his sleep – doesn’t even open his little blue eyes, just babbles sad syllables in one long stream, the up and down cadence of adult conversation with none of the sense.  Then he opens his mouth, like a baby bird, and his babbling gets more insistent, and I shift over and plug in, and hope hope hope that he just eats and then drifts off.  Lather, rinse, repeat, every hour, all night.  Teething is hard on both of us. 

 

We have had really good nights lately, more good nights than bad, but that makes the bad nights seem so much worse for some reason.  Cutting four teeth at once is a lot of pain for the little man, a lot of wakefulness, tossing and turning and crying for mom.  Sometimes he just wants to rest his head on my chest and suck his thumb, and I know I could let him cry it out in his crib – but his mouth hurts.  It hurts, and he wants comfort.  That trumps my need for sleep, it did last night anyway, because I can’t sleep hearing him crying anyhow, so I may as well drag myself up and hold him.  It is torturous, though, as every mother knows.  Being dragged from the cusp of sleep into the night, watching the hours tick by, knowing that 6:30 is coming, the workday is coming, and you have to plow through it even if you feel (and look) like death.  I was going to say death warmed over, but it’s 36 degrees outside, so there’s nothing warm about my deathly pallor today.  "You lookin’ poor about the eyes, you feelin’ ok?" they ask me this morning.  Aw, no, not really, but I’ll live.

 

I had to miss his 6 month appointment today – no big deal, but I would have liked to have gone.  I gave Patrick a list of questions, and this morning he dutifully reported the answers to me via cell phone while Jack screeched in the background.  Our monster baby is 22.1 pounds (98th %ile), off the charts length, off the charts head size.  We asked if ginormous babies can be classed as "obese" and are we doing anything wrong and should we be giving him skim milk and how do you skim breastmilk anyway?  And she said he was fine – if one of his measurements was not ridiculously huge, then she’d be worried, but since he’s proportional it would seem that he is just genetically predisposed to largeness.  And that is a relief.  What is not a relief is the fact that 22 pounds is the upper limit for his carseat, so it’s already time to by the next size up.  That came fast.

 

I love my son.  God, he’s so cute in the morning, when he is quiet and relaxed and gazing at my face, and when I open my eyes he smiles the biggest smile.  He stretches, grunts, groans, grabs his feet and chews them, reaches for my face, yanks my hair, smiling all the while.  I miss sleeping, but I love him more, so it’s ok.  Soon his teeth will grow in, and then he’ll be in Kindergarten, and then he won’t want me for comfort anymore, so I’ll revel in our precious nights together while we have them, and sleep when I’m fifty.