Oh, Cooper. You’re a fun, adorable baby. You’re generally a delight, and the fact that you’ve been sleeping through the night since you were five months old is one of the only reasons I haven’t completely lost my mind. So don’t get me wrong; I know I’m the luckiest mommy who ever lived. But dude. We need to talk.
I know that you’re in a different place, and that you’re sleeping in your pack & play instead of your crib, but come on. You’re at your grandmother’s house– not a Turkish prison. This is your pack & Play–the same one with the Winnie the Pooh pattern that you slept in exclusively for the first three months of your life. The point is, you know this thing, and it is not, as the severity of your cries may indicate, upholstered with FIRE.
I don’t know what’s been going on the past two days, but damn. It’s kind of creepy when I’m rocking you to sleep and I see your big blue eyes staring at me in the dark. Then, when I try to put you down, it’s like reverse Operation. I try to put you down gently into the hole, but anytime you hit the sides, you arch your back and scream, as if you’re taking a stiff electrical jolt.
That’s pleasant enough at the end of a long day, but then when I actually dare put you down, you roll around, scream, and then otherwise act as though I have released a thousand fire ants into your turtle footie pajamas. Now, don’t get me wrong; this isn’t what I’m complaining about. This is:
Now, in general, I love when you learn new skills, so the first time your daddy and I saw you on the monitor sitting up in your crib, playing with your blanket, we were thrilled. We couldn’t imagine how you managed to maneuver yourself up into a sitting position, but “magic” was definitely a leading theory.
My jubilance at your genius was short-lived, however, since about a week or two later, you got really good at pulling yourself into a sitting position. This was fun to watch when you did it over and over in our bed, but when you started to do it in your pack and play a few days ago, it made mommy very, very sad.
Here’s the thing: You’re awesome at sitting up, but you don’t really know what to do after that. So after I would put you down and you’d start crying, instead of just rolling over, sticking your thumb in your mouth and falling asleep after a few minutes, you’d propel yourself into a sitting position and cry. Then you’d realize that you have nowhere to go, so you’d just be sitting, and crying, and then screaming because no one wants to be sitting in a pack & play at night with nowhere to go, listening to a white noise CD.
So instead of being able to rub your head and tell you that it was time to sleep, I had to lay you down, wrap you back up, and rub your head. Except you were having none of it. You go from a “being held by mommy or daddy” position to laying down, not sitting to laying down. So I’d scoop you up and start the bedtime process all over again.
This is how I found myself last night, jackknifed over your pack & play, covering you with the top half of my body as if I were covering you from nearby grenades. My hair spilled over onto your face, and you grabbed onto it like the reigns on a particularly unruly horse. I stayed like that, then I extricated my hair, and I took one body part away, every few seconds until you finally slept. And when you closed those eyes, when the anger left your face, I remembered why I wanted to have you… and a million more just like you.
