Firstly, a few things.

* She sucks in her sleep. It is ridiculously adorable.
* She has outgrown her first batch of baby socks. Her feet still seem so tiny and yet the first time I put these socks on her, she was swimming in them.
* She has started to make baby babble sounds and her voice is so soft and cute. Before, her non-fuss sounds were very limited. It is like she has just discovered her voice.
* She makes a fantastic amount of noise when she sleeps. Sighs, squeaks, whimpers, snuffles, wails, inhuman creaky sounds, and loud breathing. She always has though; this is nothing new really.
* Her new hair is much lighter. It might just turn out all blond.
* Her eyes have gone from dark gray to medium-dark blue. So far. Mine are blue and Joshua’s are hazel.

[I will cut you.]

Nextly, some things that are probably excruciatingly tedious for non-family types.

The past couple of nights Ronin’s sleep routine (haha: “routine,” see how I delude myself) has somehow gone completely to shit. We have generally been able to put her down sometime between 7:30 and 9pm, usually twice or maybe four times before it took (I’m not saying this is perfect, but it positively glows pink with success when I think about these past few nights). She would sleep in blocks of three [blissful] hours, then two hours, and then one or one and a half hours thereafter. Generally, she is easy to put back to sleep after waking—I’d say one time per night needed extra rocking and attention. I’d get up three, sometimes four times per night and that was doable; I wasn’t complaining. On a few rare occasions, I’ve had to get up five times. Then I complained. Well, these past nights, she slept for 1.5 hours as the longest stretch and then it was one-hour or 45-minute stretches thereafter. I got up five times the first night until she was UP at 6:30 and then the next night I got up SIX bleeding times before making Joshua deal with her at 6:30. What gives kid?! I look like crap with bags under my eyes. If this keeps up all my hair is going to turn gray before I am 35.

[Eye-bags carefully edited out for my own vanity’s sake.]

[The next day.] A miracle occurred yesterday and the third night, she went down at 8:06 (had to put her down twice but no big whoop). AND SLEPT FOR FIVE AND A HALF STRAIGHT HOURS!!! I could hardly believe it when I looked at the clock as I got up to feed her: 1:40am. She went right back down and slept again for nearly three hours. Then again until 6:50 when she was UP. I have no idea what we did differently. Maybe she was just tired from the previous two nights. We’ll see what happens. We just got her down at 9:15 (took three tries).

This brings me to the horrifying and fascinating thought that her nearly three-hour stretch is just about the longest I’ve slept at one time since she was born. I would say I got two solid hours plus maybe fifteen minutes of sleep. Other than that, it’s been usually an hour and a half max (unfortunately it always takes me a few minutes to go back to sleep after I get her back to bed, drink a glass of water, rock the cradle, bang my head against the wall, etc.). It’s really rather amazing when you think about it because really I feel mostly fine. All those years I wasted getting eight hours of sleep…

By the way, Ronin would like to announce her brilliant idea for a book, it’s called, “Things that are alternatively screamingly hilarious and cryingly tragic at 4:37 in the morning while lying on the changing pad.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 10:24 pm and is filed under ronin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.