Always Another Windmill

. . . Standby, standby . . . Going live in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1.

Apologies for any concern that may have been caused by the long hiatus in blogging following the previous post. There were some things I had to do–a book I had to read, some projects to work on. Work has been stressful of late. Also, I have had somewhat less time to myself of late, as we’ve been working on night weaning with Zag. For the past almost-2 years, Zag has been sleeping with us (and he still does), sleeping next to Weirdbird, and nursing as the need arises. It’s an arrangement that has mostly worked out pretty well for all of us–nighttime feedings resulted in very little disturbance to any of us, and as Zag got older, those feedings generally tended to get less frequent. More recently though, they were starting to trend upward again, and Weirdbird had about had it with interrupted sleep. It was time for a Daddy intervention.

In practical terms, this meant that it became my job to help Zag get back to sleep every time he woke up. This was pretty rough at first. Zag was in the habit of waking up and wondering where we were around 10:30-11, our usual bed time. Well, Weirdbird’s usual bedtime. I had been staying up another hour or so to read, blog, and have some non-work quiet time to myself. That had to end for a while. When the 10:30 cry came, it was me–fair enough, as Weirbird had been answering that call for a long time. But Zag calmed right back down to nurse for her. Not being similarly equipped, I had to resort to other strategies–patience, the rocking chair, more patience. We rearranged sleeping positions–I now sleep between Momma and Zag, and had to run interference for a while when Zag attempted to launch himself over me to get to the milk. We went through a few days of having to go into the Kitchen for sleepy Zag to refuse all offered midnight snacks and realize that he wasn’t really hungry. And also to spare Momma having to listen to all the shrieks of outrage.

But now we mostly seem to be through all that. He doesn’t wake up at 10:30 as much, he often sleeps all the way through, and when he does wake up, he’ll usually settle back down for me while still in bed, without having to resort to the rocking chair. Momma gets her turn at mostly uninterrupted sleep, and we’re even to the point where she can go to bed before me again, meaning I hope I will have a little time in the evening to do things like keep up the blog.

Plenty of ideas in the queue if I can get the time to write them . . .

And it’s nice to have a turn snuggling with my boy at night. Weirdbird was talking for a while about getting a toddler bed for him, but I’m not quite ready for that. She’s had almost two years sleeping next to him. My turn for a while.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Metablogging, Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.