The Stories of our Lives

Yesterday evening, Orléane was fretful and just impossible to deal with. Today, she was fretful and empathy-inducing. In fact, she was acting the same. The difference? A good night’s sleep for mommy.

For three months now – more, if you factor in pregnancy insomnia – my nights have been fractured, and I’ve been walking around (and driving, unfortunately) with diminished alterness, only registering half of what people tell me sometimes.

Orly often does around 6 hours between nursings (for the uninitiated, let me specify this means from the start of one nursing to the start of the next one, and does NOT equal to 6 hours of sleep… if you take out, say, an hour to nurse and then coax the kid to sleep, maybe a little more if you’re stupid enough to allow yourself some personal time, you’re left with no more than 5 hours of sleep if you’re lucky). So I get 4 to 5 wonderful hours of uninterrupted sleep every other night, but she usually butchers the rest of the night with agitation, full wakefulness or another feeding. And when she magically doesn’t, Xavier will inevitably choose that night to have a cough.

Yesterday night was devoid of any kid interruption. And my inner consciousness managed NOT to wake me up anyway, so I got pure, pure sleep, from the moment at 8h30 when I dropped exhausted into bed (Frank cared for still-awake Orléane for another hour) to 4h30 when the (insert a really foul qualitative for low intelligence here) cat jumped on the bed to miaow. I did not manage to go back to sleep, fully rested that I was with my amazing 8 hours of sleep.

What brought this on? No clue. We forgot the windows open, and temperature dropped in the night. The baby fell asleep before being changed to pyjamas, so she slept with short-sleeves, and Frank didn’t tuck her in her blanket, so she was sort of cold when I picked her up at 5h30 for nursing. You think she likes cold?

In any case, I won’t be covering her too much tonight and hope for a repeat performance.

Morning Update: No repeat. Two nursings and fully awake by 5am. We’re exhausted. Good thing we’re getting a 3 day weekend after this.