sometime in the middle of the night we decided henry was staying home today. there wasn't really a question that i would skip class and be the one to stay home with him, but this morning greg suggested he stay home with him instead and i go to class, since he was feeling too sick to go to work, but not so bad that he couldn't watch henry. so i went to class to try to learn the difference between skal (shall) and vil (will) (not as easy as you'd think... even for you lawyers out there). but of course, henry was not so sick by morning as he was in the middle of the night (i.e. his fever was gone), which probably wore greg out more than a round-trip bike ride and a day in the lab would have.
he tried getting henry down for a nap and fell asleep himself only to wake up abruptly and find henry brushing his teeth in the bathroom. so no nap for henry even though last night he'd been up (as in up up... which, if you haven't been the caretaker of a very young person, is kind of like getting up in the middle of the night to do some aerobics... but dragging a bedfellow along with you). even tonight, getting him to bed, there was no dropping to sleep exhausted. there was only the usual external and then internal struggle to first resist and then to make sleep happen. as if nothing i've just relayed to you above added up to make him more tired than he otherwise would have been.
maybe that's just how it is with kids. i guess i have plenty of memories of the things i used to daydream about while trying to get to sleep at night as a kid... like flying on a magic carpet... that happened to be equipped with walls (safety purposes)... or going to the mall... or... brookfield zoo... with The Monkees.
william's also been a sleep fender-offer... ever since he was about 2 days old. i used to worry because he was getting nowhere near the amount of sleep the baby books claimed babies were supposed to get. i think that's the only reason he has such a good attention span-- he demanded we entertain him 12 hours a day. he differed from henry in that regard, who at least took sleep seriously in those first three months.
well, sleep... i should stop talking about it and go do something about it.
1 comment:
My kids never napped. At least not when parents were caring for them (they napped for grandma....). In the end, I concluded that: 1. they were just more excited about the world than other babies/kids and 2. this gave them more wakeful hours to observe and learn.
But it did create some pretty tired parents.
Their dad always worried about their not sleeping more than I did. I remember one trip to England when we had an 8 and 5 year old and neither of them wanted to fall asleep at some decent kid sleep hour. He got really upset at the thought of not enough sleep for his little ones. I have to believe that in retrospect, even he would say that it was a rather silly worry.
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