Nights are tougher than days. This is a matter of social, political and historic fact. More people die at night, your biological cycle is at its lower ebb and well you are supposed to be asleep. When you are not asleep, all is not well. There are a couple of exceptions to this, partying and sex. But lets assume that neither of these two activities are going to feature in this blog, unless we are talking 9 or so months ago.
At the moment little Max is not simply putting his head down at 9pm and re-emerging from his Moses basket at 9am. I emphasise 'is not'. Now this is not unusual, this is not unexpected. All of the books say it will be this way. All of the ante-natal classes say it will be this way. All of the Grandparents, friends, aunties and uncles say it will be this way. They all snigger and poke each other in the ribs and you can see them casting their minds back to when they were there. They remember it with a sort of fondness, more for the leaving of it than the living of it. All of the above have fantastic advice on how to deal with the aforementioned wakefullness but they are all doing it from a slight distance. They are not doing it right then, right there, right in the middle of the night.
So I can only tell you what it is like from my perspective. Its like a crazy dream. Ciara has to be on mental high alert. At any moment she can be called into lacteal action. She must be ready to jump from sleep, straight into full activity. I must be ready to write the beginning time of the feed, record the total time of the feed and change a nappy. At this stage I can do all of this without waking. This has led to some amusing incidents. Two nights ago I jumped from the bed and Ciara, a little shocked asked 'what was I doing?'. I responded that I was 'going to get the thing'. 'What thing?' Was the immediate response, 'The thing' was my witty comeback. My comedian wife pithy response was 'I'm gonna need a noun john'. Sadly the only noun that I could gather from my somnolent mind was 'The Facebook'. I also play a very silly sleepy game. Its called - Time The Pee. The premise is straightforward. Babies' bottoms are cleaned by wet cotton balls followed by dry cotton balls. When a warm babies bottom is met by a cold wet cotton ball there is a special reflex reaction. The bladder empties. Its a randomly selected directional fountain. It can hit walls, floors, chairs, faces but most annoyingly, Max's clothes (which then have to be changed - don't worry we change him every day anyway but don't like too much change). So I play a game, from when the old nappy is opened I count, one one thousand, two one thousand ... This was going great, we all had a great time, me counting, him peeing. I was wasting a lot of nappies and changing a lot of clothes. Its a great game, but it has to end. I think it's bad for the environment. He averaged seven seconds by the way.
So it's all fun and games for me. It's very different for Ciara and Max. They have to deal with the Russian Roulette of hunger and feeding. Little Max has to grow his young mind at an alarming rate while dealing with the mundane biological necessities. Ciara has to cope with an absurd convention that says we should do business during the day and sleep at night. So she and he wakes up every couple of hours and they join in the merry feeding dance. This is a real physical activity for both of them and one that leaves them tired. They were already tired. Now they are tireder. They are tireder than tired they get to 9am exhausted and the day begins.
Evolution is silly. It turns day into night and turns night into a curious mix of insomnia and absurd activity. There are strange things about bringing up children. Nightimes are the worst.
No comments:
Post a Comment