Party

My baby likes to party late. We are up till midnight most nights, just hanging out, doing what we do. Nurse, burp, nurse, poop, change, nurse, spit, change, nurse, burp, you get the idea. Husband sleeps. S'okay, he has to get up in the morning. No, wait, so do I. Seriously, someone should sleep. Might as well be him. Or me.

Nursing a baby is a pleasant thing. Makes you feel good. Feels like a miracle, that God made my body, not only to nourish this baby for 9 months and give birth to him, but then also to provide what he needs for most of his first year, not just nutrition, but also the ability to fight diseases, to comfort him, to bond with him and keep him close to me and lots of other things.

But nursing a baby off and on for hours on end, all the while getting tireder and tireder (too tired to even use proper grammar, obviously), makes me feel woefully inadequate. To stay awake (I do a better job nursing when I don't drop him) I cruise around on facebook (where, as it turns out, there is no life), work diligently to perfect my spider solitaire skills, and peruse the internet for theories on why a 6 week old would still be awake at 1 a.m.

One word that pops up is a term I refused to label my previous 13 kids with: Colic. My mother in law has told me the stories of my husband as an infant many, many times. Many. It must have been dreadful, because it honestly comes up nearly every time any one of my many children cries for longer than a few minutes. Not to mention that the whole breastfeeding mystery kind of escapes some people.

But I have avoided that word because it seemed like a bit of a cop out. I read an article about crying in babies, and how if you chart the number of hours babies cry on a graph, you get a bell curve, which means it's normal. Some cry more, some cry less, it doesn't really matter what you do. And what you are supposed to do, I'm doing. Nurse them when they want, it's a natural comforting thing. (The scientific terms escape me.)

This, however, this late night party thing, this is excessive. I may eventually describe it as colic, I don't know.

At any rate, I am sleeping a solid 5-6 hours a night. That is just enough to make my body think I'm getting enough rest to drive, but not enough for it to be safe to go through a day without coffee.

Nice thing now, though, is that no one at my house is sleeping enough, thanks to the winter olympics running till 10:30 every night. Not that we are all watching it that late, but we are watching way more tv than normal, and dragging our feet at bedtime, desperately hoping to watch another American who ought to have been able to win a medal do slightly less than they were capable of at an event that we know absolutely nothing about, using terms like "twizzles" and acting like we have some genuine interest. Heck, we live in America and we don't honestly even watch basketball, football or baseball the vast majority of the time. Superbowl, World Series, Final Four. That's about it. But we can't go to sleep unless we see whether our guy got the bronze risking his life sliding down pipes on a mountain covered with manufactured snow with his feet strapped to a big piece of fiberglass or whatever it's made of. Really?

Ok, he's asleep, so I'm going to see if I get to do that too. The party is over. Maybe.