An Essay
by Jessie
Last night I awoke suddenly and looked at the clock. It was 3 a.m. and Gabbie was still sound asleep in her crib; a record in light of the past few weeks of frequent awakenings. Being a paranoid mom, like most are, I decided to check on her to make sure she was still breathing. As I looked into her crib I noticed that she had flipped over and was sleeping on her stomach, a no-no according to current experts.
What to do? Well, that paranoid mom side took over, and I decided to flip her onto her back. As soon as I did that she started tossing and turning, which lasted for about two minutes, and then she started to cry. "She's probably hungry," I thought to myself, since it had been eight hours since she last ate. So I got her up to take her to the couch to nurse.
On the way there, I noticed she was a little stinky. "Time for a diaper change!" I whispered to my snuggly baby. "So what if it wakes her up?" I thought to myself, "Nursing always puts her back to sleep." Oh, I was so mistaken, my friends. Changing her (wet, not dirty) diaper woke her up but good, and she stayed awake while nursing, occasionally patting my shoulder, as if to say, "It's alright mom, you'll survive me being awake." Then she filled her diaper.
Diaper change number two (no pun intended) also woke her up even more, so there I was, three in the morning, with a wide awake baby, laying there in my arms, smiling at me with her most charming smile. "Time to go back to sleep!" I chirped at her. She smiled back and continued to look at me and smile until, thirty minutes later, her eyelids started to droop, and she finally fell back asleep.
This is but one example of my stupidity during the past twenty-four hours. The other occurred yesterday afternoon, while Gabbie was playing on the floor, and I was watching, while working, from the couch. "Oh how cute," I thought to myself, "she's got her thumb inside her pacifier and is sucking it." She seemed to be having fun, so I continued on working, keeping one eye on her and one on my spreadsheet.
A short while later, she was still doing the same thing, but pulling the pacifier out of her mouth every so often to complain a little bit. "Well, put it down and play" I chirped to her, thinking how cute she was all the while.
Ten minutes and much whining later, it occurred to me: maybe the pacifier was stuck on her thumb, and maybe it's uncomfortable, and maybe she can't just put it down. So I got down and peeled the pacifier from her poor thumb. And I apologized for being a kind of dumb mom.
Lessons learned? Leave a sleeping baby lie, and maybe pay some attention to a playing baby, every once in a while.
2 comments:
The same thing happened with Andrew on Saturday night! I went in to check on him, and there he was on his stomach, and I stupidly rolled him over. But he just squawked at me for a few minutes with one eye open and went back to sleep.
I'll bet it sucked being awake at 3 AM, but it sounds like you and Gabbie got some good quality time together in -- even if it was in the middle of the night!
(And those damn soothies -- it's so easy for them to get their fingers stuck in them! And yet, it's the only pacifier he will take. Sigh.)
Yeah, I had to fight the urge to roll Bridget over too when she started doing that. But if she's strong enough to roll herself over, then she's fine. She can obviously lift her head to breathe. Babies always sleep better on their tummies anyway. Too bad it's such a no-no.
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