Sleep like a baby? No, thank you!!

Whomsoever coined this phrase and thought they were referencing good sleep clearly never had a baby. Because if they did, they would know that this is what 'sleeping like a baby' looks like. At least, it's what sleeping like a baby looks like when you're talking about the baby we know as Zia. 


Step 1: When it becomes clear that The Parents are trying to get you to sleep, fight it like it's an intruder into your home in the middle of the night or the worst form of injustice imaginable.  Yell, scream, flail your arms, cry, and kick your feet stridently.


Step 2: Continue this while being bounced on a blown-up ball, with a pacifier in your mouth and something covering your eyes, music in the background, and a comfort blanket (i.e. lovey) tucked under your arm. If it's Daddy putting you to sleep, you also need something that smells like Mommy or you should yell REALLY loud.


Step 3: Finally succumb to sleep, with a few flails of arms occasionally just to keep the person putting you to sleep guessing.


Step 4: Give a few little jiggles while being carried back to the place you're supposed to sleep.


Step 5: Once put down where you're meant to sleep, open your eyes and move a little. You can opt to wake up altogether and return to Step 2 at this point, if you so choose.


Step 6: If you're willing to sleep, then this is where you sleep through a deep sleep and look extremely peaceful. (This is where 'sleeping like a baby' is desirable. Only here.) Note that this only lasts 20-45 minutes.


Step 7: Once you hit an active state of sleep and realize that your pacifier is no longer in your mouth, roll around, flail your arms, and yell for help. 


Step 8A: Once the pacifier is restored to your mouth, slowly calm down and return to Step 6. You may need some pats on the back and shushing to help you with the calming down.


Step 8B: Alternately, continue to roll around with the pacifier in your mouth, occasionally spitting it out and yelling for it again, until you have been picked up and returned to Step 2 (or a modified version of it, in the glider). 


Repeat 6-8 until you are truly awake or your parent gives up having to repeat all of the rigamaroll. Victory! You are awake and get to look at everything and get attention again!! Or, maybe you wore Mommy or Daddy out so much that you get this:

In which case, that also counts as victory because you get a warm body and a heartbeat to sleep to. Ah, the good ole days in the womb...


Makes ya think twice about saying you slept like a baby, huh? Maybe we should say 'like a worn-out parent' when someone asks how we slept and we slept especially well ...

Finding Siblings

Well, lookee here. Daddy is currently acting as Bed since the 'how we're going to wean him off of bodies' conversation scheduled for the weekend hasn't happened yet, and Mo is jealous that I get to sleep with him on me so much, which means I'm free to blog again, a mere day after the last one! Whoa!

Earlier this week, we were at our friends' house. They have a 1-year-old who is in a nanny share with another baby who is three days younger, and that family was there also. Afterward, Mo & I talked about how we want to make sure that Zia has buddies growing up, because it's super cute to watch those two babies now that they're aware of each other, interacting and crawling around. And we think it's important to raise babies in community.


Plus, if they hang out enough, maybe they can become like these twins:

Secret conversations about missing socks!

I've made lots of friends over the last few months with moms with babies right around Zia's age, so we have lots of potential to raise Zia with pseudo siblings. (And, of course, there are the gazillion friends who have had friends within the last year, though it will be a while before Zia catches up to those highly mature babies.) It's pretty funny how unaware of each other the babies have all been so far, though. Yesterday, I was on a hike with my friend Robin (of shared birth story fame), whose daughter was born a day after Zia. For about the first time, they seemed to actually look at each other from time to time, but for the most part they're far more interested in the wall than each other thus far.

Robin and I are planning to do a childcare swap starting in September or so. I'll take Eleanor for half a day a week while she's at work, and in exchange she'll take Zia half a day a week so I can have some baby-free time! Which will give Eleanor and Zia time to develop a fun little friendship like our one-year-old friends.

In the meantime, we're forcing it on them:

Clearly effective, as Eleanor found it to be an opportunity to just munch on Zia's clothes rather than her own. Baby expressions of affection!

It will be so fascinating to watch as they grow up. Who knows -- they may decide that they hate each other! Or, they'll develop a giant posse with all the other babies they get to see regularly. 

My Life as a Bed

So much for that whole 'now I can blog more regularly thing'. The last post was open in a tab on my laptop for over a month before I finally finished it and got it up. (Mind you, it WAS unusually long.) I've had another one going for over a month again and somehow just never get around to finishing it.


It's funny how time just disappears when you're staying home with an infant. I have a pretty good 'to-do' list awaiting attention, and that doesn't even include the big projects I want to get to. And yet, day after day, I'm delighted if I manage to get to the dishes. The days just melt into nights like nothing. But when Mo asks what I did all day, my report is quite short in nature, since it's basically just a cycle on repeat all day.


I keep wishing I could go back to the conversation I had with my boss and our Board Treasurer last summer, when I was about 2 months pregnant and hadn't yet told them. We were planning our upcoming 20th anniversary event and discussing the potential involvement of a board member who was on maternity leave and how much we thought she could/would do. I, of course, was saying that we should contact her to assess her interest/ability to participate, since presumably a maternity leave would apply to board involvement as well as her job. I'm just sayin'...

Yes, that's about how mad I was ...

Boss and Board Treasurer (both men -- middle-aged white men, one of significant means) immediately jumped to, 'Well, what else is she doing? She's on maternity leave. She's doing way less than when she was working!' Mind you, this was coming from someone who gets to go out in the world and stake his claim as a psychology expert in working with survivors of Gender-Based Violence. Lovely that he has no concept of sexism/feminism, huh?? But that's a whole different topic, and one on which I don't care to get started again, as I've wasted many a breath and high blood pressure on it already.


In any case, Board Treasurer, married to an Asian-American woman, commented that his wife threw their baby on her back and was back out in the rice paddies the next day (Don't get me started -- wrong on SO many levels), so surely the board member should be at our beck and call for event planning services, cuz, ya know, she's already been off a couple months already and stuff, so she can only get so many more pedicures and massages. (Okay, he didn't say that last part, but it was certainly implied.)


It was one of these moments where, not yet having experienced motherhood myself, I knew intrinsically that I was *furious* with them and that what they were saying was ludicrous, but I didn't have the specific language to respond when they asked what in the world she could be doing, particularly since the baby sleeps all day! I mean, REALLY!! Lap of luxury!!


So here I am with Baby Who Only Sleeps On Humans, unable to do much other than care for him, wishing to go back in time and tell Them Who Never Stayed Home With Their Kids just exactly what that board member's days probably looked like and why we should feel eternally grateful if she was willing to contribute any tiny amount of time at all. 

Alas, I have moved on and have zero interest in dredging up old anger spots. It just makes me think and roll my eyes. And be grateful that that is all behind me and that instead of working with people who make my blood boil all day, I now get to be greeted by a tiny person who flashes a gummy grin at me all day long. (Okay, part of the day when he's not flexing his oh-so-strong lungs. But that's a different post for a different day.)


So, as I begin to extricate myself from being a bed to him, I will get back to posting more and more. I'll just have to catch you up on the last four (!) months by integrating into the reports of the now. My head is constantly brewing with ideas to reflect upon here in the blogosphere, so be ready to be word assaulted once I get going!! Once I get done "luxuriating", that is ...