Tavish, now past six months, has settled into something of a regular sleeping pattern. At least, it's regular in its predictable irregularity.
He has three naps during the day; sometimes he takes fully as long (or longer) to settle down as he does finally asleep. Pretty exhausting for his mother. He goes to bed at night with slightly less fanfare (normally), thankfully, in large part, to boob-induced torpor.
He's good until some time between four and five-thirty AM when he makes known his disquiet. Amy gets him, rocks him back to sleep in the chair in his nursery and then, since he's proven quite vehemently (and vocally) anti-crib after that, she brings him to bed with us until he fully wakes around seven.
Me, I'm largely ignorant of all these goings on since the baby monitor is on my wife's side of the bed and, really, she doesn't need it in the first place. Though in my defence, I can say that when my gal pal went carousing out of the city overnight this weekend past I was highly attuned to the nocturnal sounds of our wee-est bairn. No coo, murmur or burp went unnoticed.
What I do regularly notice when Amy's somnambulating with the boy in the pre-dawn hours are his semi-conscious flailings after she plunks him between us in our bed, and later, if I haven't gotten up yet, when he starts to stir.
A tiny set of hands and fingers meander erratically around an area on my back or up and down my right shoulder. If I'm positioned just so, one small fist invariably finds that tender patch of skin where my neck meets my shoulder and his fingers clench spasmodically, the surprisingly painful strength belying his apparent fragility.
Serendipitiously, at least lately, these morning movements occur right around the time my alarm goes off and I attempt to lure myself out of bed to a morning run. (More success with that of late, thank goodness.)
Aside from the occasional raw neck suffered, there are very few ways more pleasant to be roused from slumber than the timorous ticklings of one's infant son as he, himself just waking, strains for the familiar.
2 simple reasons not to blog-read while hair is dangling in front of one's eyes:
* "wee-est bairn" looks like "wee bastard"
* "timorous ticklings" looks like "amorous ticklings"
My hair is now tucked safely behind my ear and the world makes sense again. :)
Posted by: Sarah | Monday, 11 September 2006 at 02:04 PM
I guess we were just heartless bastidges. Even through colic, our kid never spent one night in our bed. I know the feeling, though, from the times I've napped with Ben. At that point, it's usually met with a little frustration, because it means he's not going to be napping that day. I dreaded feeling Ben's tiny fingers exploring my ear or my eye (the latter which he sometimes gave a nice poke). Now, though, he just tells us he doesn't want to go to sleep.
Posted by: Mark | Monday, 11 September 2006 at 04:08 PM
Love that. I will tell you though, there is ONE thing even better and that is when you're nursing a baby and they are looking up into your eyes and they blink and smile and try not to break the "seal" of their suckling. Nothing like it. I wish you could experience that. Sometimes they will pull their mouth away, grin at you for all they're worth and then remember what it was they were doing and forget you're even there...
Posted by: Linda | Tuesday, 12 September 2006 at 08:48 AM