My Story of Sleep (apologys to the friends who've heard this far too many times)

This marks my first post without a real objective. It's a musing kind of a day; 38 degrees out, it's raining/snowing, the house is quite for the last few minutes of London's nap and I've been scanning my mental fileing cabinet going through all the thinking that I've done about sleep.

Here's the thing. Sleep is like food: if you haven't had it it's all you think about. London has been a horrible night sleeper from the first day out of the womb. She went through different phases of how she wanted to spend her wakefulness, but mostly she would just wake up. She'd want to nurse, and that was always the fastest way to get her back to bed. But we tried everything; feeding her heavier foods before bed, noise machines, night lights, stuffed animals, letting her cry (this didn't work because A. she would scream for literally two and half hours and B. our upstairs isn't insulated yet and she would fall alseep cold on top of her blankets). I would routinely get four or five *fragmented* hours of sleep a night. Rough. Grrr...

I've spent my time awake thinking about when I will be able to go back to sleep for over two years. But then, this week, dare I type it aloud?!, she actually has slept through the night. She's sleeping until 4:30 or 6. Tyson will get up if it's early and just tell her that it's still time for sleeping. And she lays down and goes back to sleep until 6!

I wake up anticipating youthful energy and zip and vim. And you know what? I am so tired! It's as if my body has decided to dredge up all that sleepiness that I've been working through and pushing past and it's trying to sleep out every last dusty corner of it. So she falls asleep in her stroller around 11am, and what do I do with this precious time of stillness and quiet? Read a book, drink some tea, sketch, fold laundry? Sleep sleep sleep on the sofa, listen to the trucks roll past the porch, breathe in my sleepiness and breathe it out again.

Could this week actually mark the beginning of the end of her sleeplessness? Am I still young enough that I might have a chapter of parenthood where I can get through a day without sleeping before lunch?

Well, come to think of it, most of the rest world sleeps after lunch, babies or not...Hmm, maybe I'll be able to enter a phase where a nap is all the more luxurious due to it's optional nature.

Better go get her out of the stroller, she just woke up.