The Best Worst Day
2006-01-09, 16:30

This weekend, the baby managed to be both the light of my life and the bane of my existence. I'll start with the bad first, to give this entry a nicer finish.

Over the last few days, she's chosen to have little interest in the concept of falling asleep. Or staying asleep. Saturday night was the latter, where she woke up around midnight, which just happened to be when H and I were about to go to bed after a rousing couple of hours of We ♥ Katamari (which has taken over Shaun Palmer Snowboarding's slot as Most Addictive Game, at least in our house). H stayed up with her for a bit, with me standing by to help because I wasn't going to be sleeping with the crying happening. Then I took over about a half hour later. After giving her 1/2 a bottle and playing countless games of I-look-like-I'm-asleep-but-if-you-take-5-steps-away-I-start-crying-again, she did finally fall asleep... at 330am. I was so wound up and too exhausted for sense that I didn't get to sleep myself until 430am.

So I slept in? Nope. I was up at 8am. At first I was completely miserable, but a large amount of caffeine and some quiet time while H took the baby with her on a morning errand helped a lot. That is, until the afternoon, when H went to her 3-hour long 1-hour meeting. During this time, while what was apparently a second wind gave out completely, the baby and I spent some quality time, in which every second seemed like a sleepy eternity and the baby took great joy in scratching me with her long nails that I was too tired to safely cut and refused to take a nap until about 15 minutes before H returned home.

I'm just amazed that I'm not completely exhausted today, even though I got a 'full' (read: 5-6 hours) night of sleep. Laurana this time was refusing to fall asleep at the outset, and we deemed it time to lovingly say goodnight and see if she could fid her own way to Sleepyland, which she did, after some sleepy crying. It seems like it's time to go through that fun process of weaning her off of falling asleep on our arms and doing it on her own, which really sucks because even though it seems like we've already had her with us forever, it also seems too soon for this, at least to me. Already she's growing up, taking tiny steps toward inevitable independence. It's a first string cut that leads to all the other strings being cut. I don't like it; it's painful as hell just to think about. I didn't realize how used to having that every night I'd gotten in such a relatively short time, and now it's going away.

But I think we're just too much of a distraction to her incredibly busy mind; she'd much rather play with us, smiling, than bother with sleep. She's finally become spoiled for the attention she gets at bedtime, and really, that's a good thing, in a bonding sense. When you look at it that way, we're really lucky that she'd bonded to us so quickly that it allowed for her to be spoiled at all with such a thing. I'd like to hope that she really thinks of us as her parents at this point. That's why it's been hard, deep down, to be upset about the lack of sleep, because in the end it's a sign that she's really part of us.

And even with all the sleep turmoil, she continues to show her genius. Just yesterday, while I was at attempt Ņ2 of getting her to take a nap, we were rocking in the chair in her room and Laurana was pointing to the shelves nearby and making her 'want' sign - which was once just 'eat' but has moved on to other applications - and I couldn't figure out what it was she was looking for. Then she sits up and puts her hands together at the sides and at a slight upward angle: 'book'. She was signing for a book. Mind you, she'd never used it before and we hadn't even shown her the sign in weeks (we have a book and some flashcards we'd been using, and will start using again soon), yet there it was, plain as day. Did I mention she's not yet 14 months old? A good portion of her afternoon yesterday was taken up by lounging on her Dora couch and leafing through her multitude of awful Disney-movie-based board books (a gift). If we're not careful, she's going to breach Geek and head straight into Nerd. And we can't have that.

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