Grace and Hazel

I donate blood as often as I can, as a result, 8 times out of 10 I find a parking space within a block or two of the place I am trying to go without too much circling; so I know a little about Parking Karma and how it relates to charity work. Sleeping Karma is new to me so if Jenn and or I have offended the Sleeping Karma Gods, Karmic Accountants or Whatever form they take, I APOLOGIZE!

When Grace came home from the NICU and I went back to work, she was on a fairly regular schedule. She would wake up once a night (maybe twice) for a feeding. I magnanimously volunteered to take the middle of the night feeding so that Jenn could get some much needed sleep from the last feeding of the night to the first one of the day. It worked pretty well. I sometimes suffer from occasional insomnia and feeding Grace gave me something to do and I usually managed to get a couple more hours before heading to work. When the guy at work that was determined that I be as sleep deprived as he, asked if I was getting any sleep I would say “Sure…plenty”. Jenn was too. Our schedules were out of sync as I went to bed around 10pm, woke at 3 or 4, fed Grace and then slept til 6:30….Jenn would feed Grace get to bed around midnight and then sleep until Grace woke up at 7 or 8. Not bad.

Then something weird started happening. I would half wake up around 4 and listen…nothing. I would wake up again around 5:30 and, hearing nothing, would check to see if everyone in the house was breathing and go back to bed. One or two nights of this and Jenn and I declared to each other that she might just be sleeping through the night. We had never heard of such a thing. We had heard of colic, sleep deprivation, sleep con$ultant$, hear tearing, uluating and rending of garments, but a 3 month old baby sleeping through the night, no one had ever mentioned. Even the books we have only mention such a phenomenon as “theoretically possible”. So we altered her schedule to get a feeding in around 8 or 9 pm and watched to see if she made it til the morning. And she did. Night after night. Without late night feeds, I was out of a job but I was assured that I would find another…eventually.

We were both surprised this morning to awaken to a wailing Grace at 4AM. I jumped back into the old routine fairly well. Admittedly, I was a bit groggier than in my heyday a few weeks ago and I managed to turn the feet of her pajamas inside out as I changed her diaper, which made putting her back together nearly impossible to do in the dark. Jenn came wandering in to see what the ruckus was all about and managed to help get a bottle ready and untangle the pajamess I had made. When the house settled down again, baby fed and reswaddled, we both came to the only reasonable conclusion at about the same time. We had offended the Sleeping Karma Gods by talking about Grace’s sleeping skills.

Hopefully, all is not lost. We are now on a campaign to find out what sacrifices we can make to these…wonderful…and…all powerful beings to appease them and get some more of that sleep. If Parking Gods accept blood and charity work, does anyone know what currency works with the Sleeping ones? How about a nice half-finished bottle of Scotch?

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