The Sleep Standoff.

This is a rare sleeping Babe shot taken months ago.

Babe doesn't sleep. EVER!

OK obviously that is an exaggeration. She sleeps, just not as much as I would like her too. In fact, there is a deep echo-ey valley of difference between the amount that she does sleep and the amount I would like to have her sleep. And as far as I can tell there is no rope bridge or other means of connecting the gap between the two sides. So Babe and I are at an impasse.

Oh God. I don't even know what I'm rambling about. Something about a rope bridge? I really am that tired.

I read in one of my fairly useless baby books that a newborn baby can sleep for up to 23 hours a day. Ba hahahahaha ha - for all you future moms out there; that's crap! My newborn didn't sleep more than eight hours (total, not consecutive) a day in the early weeks.

Currently Babe is sleeping in an Arm's Reach Co-sleeper beside our bed. Correction: my bed. J abandoned this noisy little creature a long time ago and has taken up residence on a foamy in the nursery. I resent this greatly. Sometimes at four o'clock in the morning when I am feeding Babe for the fifth time since she went "down for the night" and J is snoring in the other room I lay there and think up new reasons to hate him. Some are legitimate; he leaves all the cupboards in the kitchen open so that every time I walk into the room it looks like a poltergeist has been there. Other reasons are not good reasons to hate someone; he puts the soap on the tub ledge instead of the little seashell soap dish on the wall. Actually, neither of these are good reasons to hate someone but he's not losing any sleep so F him.

Anyway...Babe usually goes to sleep between nine and 10 at night (this is a vast improvement from two months ago when she usually went to sleep between two and four am). It usually takes me at least half an hour of nursing to get her to doze off. This wouldn't be a big deal if I could nurse her in the rocking chair and lay her down once she was asleep. But that's not how my baby rolls. She needs to be already in her bed and then be nursed to sleep. This is the real shitty part. In order for her to be in her bed while nursing I have to lay on my side and stretch my tit like silly putty into her open beak. I'm not sure, but my guess is that this won't play out real well for the appearance of my boobies later on. Especially since her co-sleeper is forever on the same side of my bed so it's the same tit that gets stretched night after night.

All this effort and booby sacrifice on my end only to achieve a state of perpetual light dozing in Babe. She must have some ailment that keeps her from ever falling into a deep sleep. I don't know what it is but if I find out what's causing it I'll post the name of it here and I'd encourage you to donate money to the cause. Personally I think there's a little troll inside her with a zapper and when she shifts into REM he shocks her awake. If this is in fact the cause of her wakefulness I suppose I could try to flush him out with some sort of baby enema. But the baby books say nothing about the safety of baby irrigation. It's also possible that it's gas and not a troll with a zapper.

She's been to a pediatrician. He knows about the gas - even saw it on an x-ray. He referred her to a gastroenterologist but that was a month ago and she still doesn't have an appointment. I tried being the squeaky wheel and calling his office but I still didn't get an appointment. The secretary told me that he has the file and will basically make the appointment whenever he bloody well feels like it - only she said it politely.

So the sleep standoff continues. I try and try to get her to go down. It takes forever. She finally falls asleep. I lay down and close my eyes and hers pop open and she gives me an adorable but absolutely infuriating grin as if to say - now what?

It's been four months. At what point do you shift from really, really tired to throwing feces at the walls of your padded cell? I'd like to nip this in the bud before I get there.