So here’s the thing about newborn sleep: I don’t like being woken up in the middle of the night, when one should be swaddled in a down comforter and sleeping uninterruptedly for 8 hours, but sometimes when I walk in her room and lift her screaming tense little body into my arms I feel this almost instant relaxation in her, this immediate sense that all is ok; “oh” she seems to say. “Oh, I’m going to be ok, you’re here. ”
If this ever goes away- the feeling that just my presence is enough to calm her- don’t tell me. For now, I’m her person, and she’s my baby, and sometimes, it feels like magic, it really does.
Of course, there are those times- like say HYPOTHETICALLY- when nothing calms her and she just screams and screams and I’m on like two stretches of 45 minutes sleep and I feel myself getting stupider by the minute- oh, here’s a fun example: I was at my friend Jess’s house and I saw a
children’s book named Ispy on the table in front of the couch where I was sitting. I was there for about three hours, and in the back of my mind, I was thinking “oh, I’ve never heard of that book.” It was only before I was about to leave that I fully saw it and realized: “oh. I Spy. The book is I Spy”
(oh oh AND as ANOTHER example of how sleep deprivation is getting to me: whenever Reagan is screaming I call her my “little baby dragon”, because her red face and flailing limbs make her seem like she’s a little pterodactyl.
It took me 6 weeks to realize: dinosaurs and dragons: two different things)
Anyway, what? Oh right: for all that it’s magic, for all that, really, this is the hardest but also the best thing I’ve ever done with my life, I feel like I’m in a state of suspended animation, holding my breath, waiting for reality to resume. Almost every morning Mike takes Moose on a field trip to get us coffee (the coffee shop gives moose cookies. We appreciate that) and we sit in bed with the baby and snuggle and watch HGTV and drink our coffee and it’s really just terribly wonderful. But in the back of my mind it looms: work, schedules, my life. We’ve been in a bubble and it’s about to burst.
You will always be her safe place.
Kyle’s five and there’s still a bit of an exhale when I wrap him up for whatever reason he needs me to. It’s why the word perfect was created.
And new bubbles will form, I promise. A million of them.
I got into my kids’ rooms every single night to “check on them” although they’re three and six, so they don’t need much checking. Anyway, still, every SINGLE night walking in there and seeing them asleep has a powerful calming effect.
i love that bubble feeling. Great post lizzie
Yes! By far the hardest and the best. And life in this bubble…I’ve lost complete sense of time (weekdays, weekends, it’s all the same). It’s a wonderful but also very strange place to be. I keep feeling like I’m in this holding pattern, waiting for my life to start again…and then I realize – this IS my new life. Yeah, work and schedules and all that will come back but I don’t know…it’s just…different now.
(What I am trying to say is that I nodded my head through this post. And this incoherent comment has been brought to you by over a month of sleep deprivation)
Love the instant relaxation. Daniel still does it when he’s crying in his crib and I pick him up.
Also, if it makes you feel better, dinosaur skeletons are thought to have been responsible for the idea of dragons. So basically the same thing, right?