A Not-So Good Day

Just as the good day hinges on the baby sleeping a bunch, the not so good day happens when he doesn't sleep. It starts with an almost sleepless night, one where he's decided that eating is more important. He's up less than an hour after I go to bed and continues to wake up every couple of hours. And it's not just that he's waking up and crying. I actually don't have much problem with that. Sometimes he'll have a nightmare or wake himself up coughing. But after a minute or two of fussing, he's back to sleep and I've only woken up enough to roll over and register the disturbance to my sleep.

It's different when he's hungry. He can't get back to sleep on his own. So I have to wake up and feed him, which can take anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes. And it tends to take longer on these hollow nights when his stomach won't stay full. Eventually he wakes up for the final time, half an hour before my alarm goes off. There's a special kind of despair at that moment, when you know you won't be getting back to sleep.

Despite waking up so much earlier than usual, I fumble through the morning and end up leaving the house late. Which means I hit traffic (I usually skirt the very beginning of rush hour). Leaving the house five minutes later than normal means I get to work more than twenty minutes later then normal.

At least I can load up on caffeine at work, zone out without putting someone's life in danger. Yesterday nothing was going right, but at least none of it was my fault. And waiting on responses from five different people on three different tasks meant that I had a decent amount of time to just zone out in front of my computer screen. Not ideal but not the worst thing ever, either.

After work I had a dentist appointment. My third in a month. On the bright side, this one should be the last until my next cleaning. Still, going to the dentist is never fun, and now it breaks up my only free time. I had just enough time to go home and pump before I had to go pick up Gavin from daycare.

I brought home a cranky kid and fed him again. Fed him so much and for so long that I was starting to worry about walking Kina. There were a few minutes when I was sure that Gavin was just going to nod off early, meaning that I'd have to deprive Kina of her walk and hope that she took it upon herself to poop in the backyard instead of waiting until midnight to poop in my office, Luckily, Gavin finished eating and woke up, so we were able to walk the dog.

The worst part of days like this (other than the lack of sleep) is that I still have to be on. If I'm grumpy or testy it just makes everything worse for everyone. (And maybe I lashed out at Kevin a bit, because these days are an order of magnitude harder when he's on the other side of the world). But with Gavin, I still need to be cheerful and silly, make faces while he's eating and talk to him and play with him. In the olden days, before I had kids, a day like this would end with a bottle of wine and a Buffy marathon. This time I got Gavin to bed just in time to have a glass of wine and read a chapter in my book.

But it could have been worse, as I kept telling myself. The kid is happy, the dog is walked, even the kitchen got cleaned when bedtime came and went with a wide-awake baby.

The hardest part is that the light at the end of the tunnel is so far away. Kevin won't be home for more than a week, and I likely won't have a good night's sleep until then. But my baby is one of the easy ones. There are at least as many good days as there are bad days. And I do have resources to call on if it ever gets worse than this. Skirting up to the edge of what I can handle sucks, but I can still handle it.