Sunday, November 15, 2009

shock to the system

I have been very hesitant to admit to anyone to what a completely awesome, amazing, wonderful, fantastic sleeper Elliot is. I'm terrified of jinxing it. The reality is that for a while now (cough, past three months), he has been sleeping really, really well (cough, cough, 10+ hours per night, uninterrupted). We had a hiccup on our recent trip across a couple of time zones where his routine was off enough that he didn't sleep straight through the night, but he was easy to get back down with a bottle and a few minutes of rocking, and after a night or two, he was back to normal.

Last night, he and I were wide awake from 2am until nearly 4am, and dozing on and off until 5am when I finally got him settled back into his crib. I have NO IDEA what was going on. He was acting a little weird (aside from being awake, which was weird enough in itself) and he was covered in a cold sweat, but I suspect the latter was just due to the fact that I was holding him against me in a blanket sleeper for hours and his body was reacting to the sauna-like conditions. Anyway, he seems fine today - no signs of illness or anything. M thinks she might not have fed him enough during the day yesterday (I was out and she had solo parenting duty) so I'm really hoping he was just too hungry to sleep through, then was so thrown off by being awake that he couldn't get back to sleep easily. I am familiar with the horror stories about babies who slept perfectly until 8 or 12 or 18 months, only to morph into sleeping terrors, and I hope hope hope that is not be what we are moving into. My heart goes out to those parents - I truly do not know how they do it. Sleep is so essential to my patience and coping ability.

In short, I'm SO out of practice on the nighttime duty (on accounta being luckier than any girl should be and I'll understand if you all hate me now) and I'd love to stay that way, if it's not too much to ask. Pretty please and thank you. :-)

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