Fighting Sleep

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Luca is a good baby. Even now when he’s sick and tired of being sick and tired, he still hands out smiles if you ask him nicely. Really the only time he acts like a jerk is the 10 minutes before he goes to bed.

And the weird thing is this my absolute favorite time to hang out with him. Because I love to see him fight off sleep. He makes such a passionate effort to stay awake, even though he loses the battle each and every time.

Take last night. I got home and both Diana and Luca had the crazy eyes. Luca had been barfing off and on all day and Diana was at her wits end. So she handed him over to me and said, “I just gave him a bottle and some Tylenol.”

I asked her, “Doesn’t Tylenol make him puke even more?”

Luca answered my question by covering me with puke not once, but twice. I took him upstairs, laid him on our bed and changed into non-barf clothes.

I then picked him up and said, “Let’s do this.” Sensing he was about to lose the battle against sleep, he erupted in his nighttime fury. But I had my plan set.

First, I dim the chandelier in our room. It makes this beautiful star-y pattern on our ceiling. Luca knows he cannot resist the star pattern. I hold him in my arms, and he can’t help but see the hypnotist ceiling. He actually thrashes to avoid it. “No no no! Not the beautiful ceiling!” But then he locks his eyes on it. Point for Dada.

To add insult to injury, I do my patented figure 8 walk around the room. This is clinically proven to make babies go to sleep. I think it has to do with the fact that my left leg is shorter than my right. This creates a slight swaying motion in my gait. It’s baby Nyquil.

This is when Luca knows he’s done for. His little eyes flutter, Then they close. But that doesn’t fool me. He’s usually good for at least three bursts where he forces his eyes open and he helps. “Ha ha! No sleep for me.”

If I really want to finish him off, I’ll turn on his little baby fish tank in his crib. It’s this trippy little thing that plays music and has this blue screen that simulates the cutest little fishies you’ve ever seen floating my.

When I put him down, He’ll thrash his head back and forth trying not to look at the cute fishies. But then he finds his comfortable flat spot on his head and it’s lights out. He spreads his arms out wide like he’s giving the world a hug and then we don’t hear from him for the next 7 hours.

p.s. I don’t have any new photos. So enjoy this image that inexplicably comes up when I Google “Fighting Sleep.”