9:23 AM, and on coffee number three.
Remember those puffy-eyed early-morning photos I wrote about yesterday? The ones I said were a kinda funny byproduct of having babies, and would one day become a thing of the past?
I take it back. Once you are a parent, you can never again lay down your head with the total confidence that you will, in fact, sleep.
This has been proven to me time and time again, and yet I never learn: When a child sees that a parent has begun to go soft (perhaps, say, going to bed at a normal hour rather than diving between the sheets at the earliest possible minute because they never know how many hours of that night are going to be spent bouncing and/or nursing), do you know what that child also sees? A DARE.
The very large person who gives me things appears to be relaxing, they think to themselves. Time to shake shit up.
Yesterday I wrote to a reader whose 9-month-old was not sleeping that it’s hard, yes, but eventually your child will get older and he or she will sleep. And so will you. (As I am, of course, a Wise Old Parent Who Has Made It Through Infancy and am thus obviously an expert in such topics, I get to make grand declarations of this sort.) And then, mere hours later, my daughter decided to remind me, once again, that grand declarations exist only to make you regret having made them.
I had a feeling that the night wasn’t going to go especially well when I put her to bed and could not locate Pink Bunny or Grey Bunny, the creatively named rabbits that my two-year-old drags with her virtually everywhere. But we had been entertaining friends all afternoon, and I figured she’d be exhausted enough from the festivities to…pass out without them…?
…Maybe?
Nope.
She did eventually fall asleep, after I created a virtual Animal Zoo on her bed consisting of every single stuffed animal in the house (with the notable exceptions of Pink Bunny and Grey Bunny). But then, around 1AM?
–> Bunny emergency, Defcon 1.
Thus commenced an (intensive, but unsuccessful) hunt through a fully-lit house, after which I crawled into my daughter’s toddler bed (as an aside, the amount of time you spend sleeping in a three-foot-long bed when you are the parent of a toddler is kind of remarkable). I tried to convince her that her stuffed raggedy ann-style doll Mia was an acceptable alternative. (No.) …Rina the Ballerina? (No.) …Random green monkey deployed from emergency extra-toy stash? (WAIL.)
Then, in one of those rare-but-miraculous moments when the clouds open and the parenting gods send rays of sunshine down on you, I reached into the crack between her bed and the wall (a spot that I swear I’d searched several times before), and?
Pink Bunny.
I have never in my life been more excited by the sight of matted fur. I was almost as excited as my daughter, who was radiantly happy in the way that only a beloved bunny or a really good cheese stick can make a person.
We were still displeased about the absence of Grey Bunny, but Pink Bunny seemed sufficient for the time being. I replaced the Animal Zoo and went back to sleep, but by now my daughter knew that she had the power to get me back into her room. And that was power she was going to use.
The following requests and/or statements were spread out between the hours of 1:45AM and 3:45AM, in roughly half-hour increments. Each required a trip into the bedroom, a corresponding action on my part, and fifteen minutes of snuggling “just for a minute.”
Mama I need water.
Mama my water made my pillow wet.
Mama my water made my sheet wet.
Mama LOOK IT’S MY PINK BUNNY! (This, apparently, after a momentary lapse into sleep erased the “finding Pink Bunny” moment from her memory.)
So I went in for the sixth (eighth? twelfth? I have no idea) time. “Oh yay, it’s Pink Bunny! Yay, we found him! Hoorayyyyyy! I love you go to bed.”
Eventually, she did. And then stayed there until 7AM, like the (sometimes) good little sleeper she is.
The morals of the story: 1) Always have extra bunnies. 2) No baby is a good sleeper all the time, which means that we all get to be in this exhausted boat together, which is kind of nice because at least we have company. And 3) Children are really, really good at keeping you on your toes, so never relax your vigilance. Remember: sleepless nights are only a lost bunny away.
P.S. If anyone has seen a grey bunny who answers to the name “Grey Bunny,” please report back ASAP.
