Sleep

When you spend a lot of hours in the dark holding and nursing a baby, you think up a lot of blog posts that never actually make it onto the blog. Last night, I was thinking (not surprisingly) about sleep, and getting babies to sleep. With Barak, it was simple: you pick me up, I sleep; you put me down, I stop. With Iyyar, it is about the same, although if you swaddle Iyyar tightly (we call it a baby burrito around here) and put him in the bouncy seat, preferably in front of the dishwasher, you can get some good naps out of that. At night, he will generally sleep in the cosleeper, but again only if swaddled. However, this takes some sneakiness on my part.

What Iyyar really would prefer would be sleeping with me, ideally on me, all night. While I am okay with ending the night with him in the bed, the truth is that I don't sleep as well when he's in the bed--I worry that he'll roll into the mattress, or up against my clothes, or something like that. So I cuddle him to sleep, either lying on the bed with him or in the glider rocker, and stealthily transfer him into the cosleeper.

Sometimes this works. Sometimes he just carries on sleeping until he gets hungry. More often, though, he senses that something is not right and starts to wiggle. Then he coughs. Then he wakes up properly and begins to howl with all the righteous indignation of someone who shelled out for a first-class ticket, went to sleep happily in a plush reclining seat, and woke up to find himself ignominiously relocated to a ratty suitcase in the baggage car. "Excuse ME! I did NOT agree to this. I believe I agreed to go to sleep on Imma's delightfully squishy postpartum tummy, NOT on this rock-hard AAP-approved foam rubber travesty of a--a--what do you call it again? A mattress? Well I call it FEH!"

Generally though if he is swaddled it is okay, since he tends not to feel the difference abruptly enough to wake him up. Last night, because it is warm and I don't like the idea of having the central AC on just so that I can wrap a baby in three layers of blanket, I tried to get him to go to sleep unswaddled. I reasoned that I should try to get him to go to sleep next to me, not on me, so that the transition wouldn't be as glaring. I lay down. I laid him down. I closed my eyes. He was about three inches away. I heard snuffling. And shuffling. And wiggling. And scootching. Then I felt warm little puffs of air on my cheek. Then I felt the rustle of little eyelashes on my nose. Then I heard a tiny heave and a moment later had Iyyar's face plastered completely against mine. And then I heard a happy little sigh, and a moment later, snores.

Iyyar 1, Imma 0. But I'm not a sore loser. In fact I kind of like it when he wins.