The Night of Three Times

Life with a newborn is constantly changing. You get few days in a row of sameness, and and you let your guard down. You think to yourself, "Hey! If this is how it's going to be, this isn't so bad." And then, things change again and throw everyone (your newborn included!) for a loop.

Lucy gave us 4 days in a row of good sleep. She'd go down between 10pm-11pm after a couple of hours of fussing and cluster feeding, stay down until around 3 or 4 am, have a quick feeding and be back down until around 7. A really great schedule that made perfect sense, allowing me to feed her until she fell back asleep and letting me get up and ready for the day. I've even learned to start loving the middle of the night feeding  now that I'm back at work, where we get to just cuddle quietly together without anything else to do.

Of course, everything changed last night. She did her cluster feeding a bit earlier than usual, and fell asleep an hour earlier than usual, at 9pm. So, I went with it. Put her down for the night and headed back downstairs for a full hour of hands free, boob free time! "Maybe we are inching towards getting our post-bedtime evenings back," I thought to myself, like the fool that I am.

All was well, even an hour later when B and I came up to sleep. She stayed asleep in her bassinet, breathing heavily. B and I fell asleep at 10, also perfectly contentedly. Of course, OF COURSE, Mia chose this night, this beautiful night, to start screaming at midnight. For absolutely no obvious reason once B went to investigate. And of course, OF COURSE, said screaming also woke our perfectly sleeping baby, messing the whole schedule up.

We may have gotten an hour of freedom, but we certainly paid for it in the middle of the night. Because Lucy's middle of the night wake up was so much earlier than usual, she woke up a second time at 5am, and this time, screamed every time I put her down, which meant we  dozed while she was in my arms for 2 hours (I couldn't even put her down next to me until 7am!).

Thank goodness it's Friday. It certainly makes these prickly eyes easier to bear.