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November 13, 2005
Madeline in the middle of the night
On Friday and Saturday night Madeline wasn't interested in sleeping. She preferred to cry inconsolably. Madeline can be consoled by presenting her with some breast milk but Sarah was getting to the end of her rope and mentioning that she was not enjoying the experience of slowly becoming cowlike in her purpose in life. So last night at 2 AM after Madeline had drunk from one breast it was my turn to try to get her to sleep with nothing but my sleep deprived addled wits. I tried to get her to stop crying with the typical rocking motions but that didn't work for the first few minutes. I tried changing her because I figured as long as she was awake I couldn't wake her by changing her. She finally reached a silent awake state and I took her back into the bedroom. When I put her down next to Sarah she began wailing again. So I took her back into the living room. I rocked her in my arms until she got back into the silent alert state. This time I figured it would be best to get her all the way to sleep. So I put her into the Papasan rocking seat from Fisher Price that when everyone sees it they ask whether they make one for adults. I watched her for twenty minutes and she watched me as she rocked. I turned the rocking motion off since Sarah mentioned that 20 minutes was the limit for rocking and it slowly leveled back to rest. I moved to the couch to watch her at this point and then fell asleep on the couch. An hour later when I awoke she was asleep in the swing papasan with her head tucked into her shoulder. I carried her back into the bedroom.
It is difficult when she doesn't sleep but nothing is as bad as when she sleeps so deep that she appears to be potentially dead. Babies don't sleep like adults. If they are very asleep they don't just wake-up when you nudge them and ask them to awaken. We went to Stop and Shop on Friday night and placed her into the baby Bjorn for the first time. By the time we had reached the counter she was so fast asleep that both Sarah and I were wondering if I had suffocated her accidentally as we walked around. I have never been as terrified of something as the total terror of possibly suffocating my own child. We dismantled the Bjorn as we were exiting the parking lot and found after a few minutes that we didn't need to call an ambulance as she started to twitch.
So it is a lose-lose scenario. She keeps us awake when she cries and when she sleeps we panic that she might no longer be breathing. My theory on it is that people are supposed to feel post-partum depression, both mother and father, because it keeps the two depressed people closer to each other, fostering monogamy, that otherwise might not happen naturally. So Sarah and I are getting cozy with each other as we go through some tougher nights together.
Posted by dhousman at November 13, 2005 09:56 PM