Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Late Night Luca



After 4+ years, the blog has fallen into some predicable patterns. Summers are filled with stories of my intense fear of the boys near swimming pools. Spring is focused entirely on the lead up and let down of Elijah’s birthday and Winter revolves around my weepy and sappy year end notes to my family.

But Fall? Fall is all about Daylight Savings Time. This meaningless turn back of the clock never ceases to toss our family onto its ear. It always, always breaks the boys. They wake up at 4am. They sleep fitfully and angrily. They make me grouchy at new jobs.

Luca has been particularly affected this go around. Each night at bedtime, he stands in his crib shouting our names to tuck him in for the 99th time. Even Grover. He springs awake 5-100 times a night and attempts to wake up his roommate brother. All of which can be heard over the baby monitor.

“Eli! Eli! EEEEEEEEEEEEEELI!”

“Luca! Be. Quiet.”

“ELI!”

“Luca! No! Bad boy!”

After this goes on for a while, I feel compelled to save Elijah and try to get Luca back to sleep. I kind of love it, though. Oh, I try to act mad when I go in there.

“Luca. You need to go sleepies.”

“Can I watch Fireman Sam?”

But then comes the greatest part. The rocking. Even though Luca seems wide awake, he’s usually exhausted from sleeping ½ hour a night. So when we arrive at the rocking chair, he clamps onto me like one of those Kuala Bear thumb toys.

It takes about three seconds for him to fall asleep, but I like to just sit there and listen to his heavy breathing.

Baby sleep experts will tell you this is the worst thing you can do. To reset the sleep patterns, you gotta put them down to bed and walk away. Allowing a baby to be rocked in the middle of the night will create a pattern of neediness and sleeplessness that can take months to fix.

But I’m fairly sure if the experts were hugged by Luca in the middle of the night, they’d give me a pass on this one.

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