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there’s this little girl i want to meet someday. her name is Lily. she was four weeks old yesterday.

her parents live here, in this smallest of capital cities. i don’t know them…though in the newpaper clippings they look vaguely familiar, as if perhaps i’ve brushed by them in a grocery store aisle or a coffee shop over the years.  i may happen on them again someday, later, our daughters in the same gymnastics or driver’s ed class. i may. i hope i do.

they are not here right now. they’re in Toronto, with their daughter, at Canada’s foremost hospital for sick children.  Lillian O’Connor is four weeks old. she is waiting for a heart transplant.  without one – and soon – she will not survive.

there’s another little girl in the same hospital who i’ll never meet. her name is Kaylee. she was two months old yesterday. she has a rare and fatal brain malformation…there’s nothing doctors can do to save her.

Kaylee’s parents want to donate Kaylee’s heart to Lily, if there is compatibility and the ethical protocol can be met…and if Lily does turn out to be highest on the recipient list when Kaylee is declared dead.  the story is an emotional Paaschendale…mud and tragedy enough to drown in.

21 years after the first successful infant heart transplant, infant organ donation is still a very messy issue.
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i’ve been waking up with Kaylee and Lily’s parents on my mind the past few days.   i’ve been waking up a lot, admittedly, with a teething baby whose bronchiolitis has her jacked up on ventolin and sleeping in torturously small 45 minute increments the past 36 hours or so.  crawling out of bed at 2:30 am, and 3:30, and 4…i consciously force my brain to remind itself, i’m glad she’s here. i’m glad she’s relatively healthy. this too shall pass...and it can hurry the f*ck up and not let the door hit it on the…grumble grunt…zzzzz. the reminders keep me from cursing quite so flagrantly.

four years ago i would have eaten glass for the luxury of waking to soothe my baby.

i think Lily and Kaylee are both first babies, as Finn was.  i peer into the picture of their parents’ faces, these four new parents, on my computer screen and wonder.  any time a death sentence is pronounced upon your child, the world crashes in on itself.  when it is your firstborn, and parenthood is a new world you’ve turned your life inside out to embrace, the crash is perhaps particularly bewildering, because you become that contradiction our society has no words for…a parent who has no child.

i wonder what will happen to them, to Kaylee’s parents, to Lily’s. about waiting by the bedside of your daughter, waiting for news of a transplant heart, every cell trained on wishing and praying and willing the universe to provide; about the helplessness and heartbreak of knowing mercy can come only in the form of another family’s hell. i wonder about Kaylee’s mother waking in the middle of the night a month from now, and whether some small part of her will rail that it was not her girl who could be spared. i wonder how their sorrow will mark them. her mother is only twenty…i heard her voice on the radio this morning, and it made me cry. i hope her strength is long, enduring. i hope nobody is fool or cruel enough to say to her, “you’re young. you can have another baby.”

i wonder at the grace shown us, strange backhanded grace, that we were never given hope after Finn’s first lung collapse at an hour old.  i knew his death came because nothing more could be done for him…not because the cure didn’t come in time, not because there were no donors to save him.
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nobody talked to us about organ donation when Finn died. he only weighed a kilogram, hefty for a 26 weeker, but – as vital organs mostly need to be transplanted among people within similar weight ranges – probably too small for any recipient baby to have undergone the transplant procedure.  his corneas? probably too underdeveloped. and the oxygen loss he suffered when his lungs failed him at birth – that probably made him a poor donor too.

or so i tell myself. in truth, the possibility of donation didn’t cross my mind during the hours we had with him. and it was never mentioned, probably for all the reasons above.

if it had been, in that strange underwater blur of clanging ventilators and harsh lights and fear and beauty that was the lifetime lived in the blink of an eye beside that little incubator on which i wrote his name and all my fierce, defiant hope on a piece of masking tape, i might have resented it.  it takes time to process the shock of having had a baby at all, let alone a baby whose prognosis is suddenly more dire than ever imagined…and time is precious when you don’t have much of it and thinking about after when he was still here was something my mind flatly refused to do, full stop, except to cram in as much of the sight and the smell and the feel of him, tiny fingers squeezing my own, as i could while i could.  because i did understand, right from the moment that first doctor clapped hope shut all over my eager face, that time would be too short and time with him was all that counted.

and yet, in the same breath, i would’ve said yes, had it been an option. because some part of him, then, would have had more time. even if that part was not for me to touch, to know.  the hardest point of coming home with just a blitzkreig of memories and an urn was that my child – in the eyes of the world – disappeared. i could do nothing to help him. but to help another child live through him? that difference would’ve been staggering, i think, on the long road to my own peace.

organ donation among infants is relatively rare, and controversial. even when a child’s  physiology is incompatible with life, as in the case of ancephaly or the brain anomaly Kaylee suffers from, the requirements for declaration of death are often not met until healthy organs have deteriorated past the point of transplant.

the rules exist to protect the living from having organs harvested, obviously.  and yet the system works particularly poorly with infants because definitions of death – brain death vs. cardiac death – are inconsistent and because the organs are so small and easily damaged.

as it stands at latest reporting, Kaylee’s parents plan to take their little girl off life support today.  they plan to make her heart available – so doctors will stand by, waiting for her heart to stop beating, and for the full five minutes to pass before she can legally be declared dead. and Lily’s parents? they have to decide whether to accept the heart, to risk having their daughter prepped for surgery and readied to receive the heart, without knowing whether or not after the five minutes required by law have past Kaylee’s heart will still be viable.

gah.

and i sit here in Lily’s hometown, what should be Lily’s hometown someday, my heart in my mouth.

these two families have found each other in Toronto over the past week or so, and in each other found the possibility that their daughter’s stories may merge, two hearts into one life.

Update: the story only gets more fraught…last night, Kaylee’s parents said goodbye and their daughter was brought into surgery to attempt donation (though it apparently isn’t clear whether Lillian was, in fact, the designated recipient), but Kaylee stayed awake when life support was removed. as her condition means her organs only fail when she’s asleep, the surgery was obviously called off.  it doesn’t mean her prognosis, unfortunately, is any rosier, and her family is vowing to try again for donation if circumstances make that possible.  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090408.BABY08/TPStory/TPNational/Ontario/

baby, you’re much too fast.

Posey scoots now, small arms propelling her backwards over the hardwood like a slippery, self-denying seal.  it makes her happy, this autonomy, this discovery of the world. ooh, another dust bunny! i think i heard her coo.

shoulda bought one of those sleepers with the mop attachment on ’em. happy baby, clean floors.

i have a job interview tomorrow.

it’s a big one, a federal job, a job with pension and all those exotic things that i haven’t had in the almost twelve years since i left the K-12 classroom. i spent a whole weekend last month compiling my twelve-page application, and most of the trip to Halifax having Dave quiz me on policies and mandates and the 73 other things i’m trying to stuff into my brain so i have a chance of not being blown out of the water by the internal candidates.  March is going out like a lion, a foot of snow here last night, and so school is closed and i’m trying to prepare a strategic plan for the presentation part of the THREE-HOUR interview while two sets of small snotty hands paw at me.

Dave is home, bless him. he has my back. and my babies.

it feels heady to draft communications strategy, to luxuriate in concepts like innovation and coherence. the notion of this job sings siren songs of salary and semi-security and skills development, of arriving.  i am all ears, a silly adolescent eager to put out for the big letter sweater who makes her feel she’s good enough.

but the prospect of shoehorning my stretched, milk-swollen bosom into my good jacket like a trussed chicken makes me feel exposed, faintly grotesque…Betty Boop playing professional.

and every time i try to imagine opening my mouth to say something articulate about my qualifications, i choke, feel brittle and strange and false, like a child caught believing in imaginary friends.  i want this. it scares me.

i have grown accustomed to being home. i catch Josephine’s eye as she gnaws fiercely on a stuffed rabbit, and her eyes crackle with light.  Oscar dons his Miffy apron and pulls his stool up to the kitchen counter to help me cook; wanders the house in underpants. my daughter will sit up soon, then walk, speak her first words. and if i get this job, i will not be there for nearly so much of that.

part of me wants to freeze this moment, the weight of this babe in my arms, the laugh of my boy as he shouts hoo-way! that part of me would stay here forever.  it is afraid i will fail at anything else.

i will not know unless i try.
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… some help, if you will.  i’m rusty at this interview stuff, struggling to remember the cadence of work, how people sound when their conversations aren’t mostly about poop. what’s the best job interview question you’ve ever been asked?  what do you wish you’d answered?

you can be my practice team.

wish me luck.

at precisely 9:37 am this morning, i woke up.

i’d been up for hours, obviously. people who sleep until 9:37 with two little children in the house usually have Child Protective services knocking on the door…or so i comfort myself. morning coffee is most scrumptious dark and bitter.

but at 9:37 i became conscious.

(gives head a shake, looks around warily. flexes muscles. discovers muscles – mental and physical – have atrophied. shrugs.  notices that shrugging hurts.)

i’ve been  housebound – thank you bedrest, colic, and interminably freezing winter – for about ten days short of a year, now.  it’s made me alternately shack-wacky, morose, and, uh, lazy.  but also eerily phlegmatic.  contented, even.  i march to the frazzled low-grade ommm of Radio Free Mama.

once you give over to the idea that you don’t control your days, you’re free. absolved.  you’re not going to cure cancer, you’re just going to get through today. smile at that baby. keep the house at a dull roar. clean yourself. change a few diapers, read what snatches of posts you can, empty the potty.  even do some contract work, but blearily, one foot in front of the other.  no long-term plans. no sustained focus. no pressure.

until you wake up. and you notice that you have been operating on the intellectual plane of a Stepford Wife.

oh, i think. i fret, even.  but for the best part of a year, other than ponying up to the bar of past birth traumas, i haven’t done any significant fretting about ME.  being just a vessel – for life, milk, and stray eyebrow hairs – is kinda refreshing.

then you remember that vessels eventually have to GO somewhere.

so there i am in mid-stride on a weekday morning and i suddenly notice that i am not bone-shakingly exhausted. i glance in the mirror, but barely know myself without my eyelids down around my knees. i cast about for something to focus the energy on, and discover that showering and laundry suddenly no longer feel like Olympic accomplishments.  this is disappointing.

what in the name of god do i do NOW?

send life purpose, please. must be compatible with parenting small children and preferably enjoy being squeezed into ten-minute intervals and be achievable from the comfort of my home couch.  nothing requiring extensive sustained focus need apply. copious monetary reward an asset. should challenge mind and preferably do something for thighs as well.

perhaps i will start an Ashram. online. i will be its guru.

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being home with baby for nearly a year after birth, with maternity benefits that help pay the bills, is a privilege. i’m grateful, o Canada.  i’m a parental leave proponent.  but mentally, the always-on-call nature of parenting and the cloistered compartmentalization of being at home makes it altogether the most isolating and exhausting thing i’ve ever done, bar none. i learned this when Oscar was small.  i forgot, until today, because i was too tired to remember.  when O was fourteen months old i started a new full-time contract outside the home, and for the first while that forty-hour week really felt like going to a goddam day spa.

(please not to stone us. we bruise like a peach. and i am totally boggled and awed by you wild Americans who end up back at work with six-week-olds.  both my kids had nasty, sleep- and sanity-destroying colic for at least four months and i’m quite sure i would have killed someone, possibly the children, had i had to get up for work every morning and actually dress myself and drive somewhere, let alone perform job duties. not kidding. you have either my utmost respect or my deepest sympathies: i’m never sure which is appropriate.)

i’m just sayin’ there comes a point at which i begin to fray from lack of adult interaction, from the absence of the casual verbal contact that feeds my extrovert self, from a desperate need to engage in the back-and-forth of social capital.

hence Twitter and Facebook updates and the occasional post when i manage to focus long enough. social media pundits critique these forms of communication as a bunch of people talking at each other, but i’m not sure they’ve ever gone to a playdate with a bunch of stay-at-home parents trying desperately to carry on a conversation over howls and wiggles and toy-retrieving – tweets are positively linear and interactive by comparison. and i get to make someone laugh without nibbling their toes.  not that i don’t love toe-nibbling, but now, a year into my odyssey of A Hundred Years of Semi-Solitude, i am beginning to wish i lived on a kibbutz. or a commune. or in a climate where taking the children outside on the first day of spring wouldn’t need to involve snowsuits.

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what was/is your experience of being at home with the little people?  and do you think i need saffron robes for my online ashram?  and perhaps cupcakes?

Originally uploaded by o&poecormier

a rough night, little one. you are on the threshold of so many things these days that sleeping – so recently finally mastered, o thing of beauty – has suddenly left us, abandoned ship. i am bereft, blurry, unable to steer a straight course with the gaping hole of its absence sitting square across my forehead.

the shreds of my mind split into two camps.

i am agog that the human race survives in spite of these hallucinatory days that seem so common as to be unremarkable.

and i am suspicious, wondering what i’m doing wrong, what false idols of civilisation i’ve blindly bought into to thus rob me and mine of the natural rhythm of things? babies in tents and camps and caves must have slept, for millenia they must have snored beside their parents and sisters and brothers and aunties and the family goats or whatnot.

i tested this theory, minus the goats.

but about four months old, you, my cosleeping nursling, began vying for the title of Most Likely to Be Voted Out of the Igloo, or Off the Island. wide awake at 3 am every night. for hours. most unhappy. so we began training you to sleep in your little cot, teaching us both to learn to rest beside each other without spending half the night awake. i thought you were the one fighting rest, Josephine. but when you finally did sleep through, i popped awake every time you sighed or cooed.

sleep is a habit, that much is clear.

i got earplugs and we spent a week in heavenly habitual peace. i’d been thinking we’d soon move you into your brother’s room. my hubris called fever down on our heads.

you scared me, little one. so hot, burning hot, suddenly, in the middle of the night. i almost left you to fuss, not realizing. then i bundled you up in my arms, recanting on all the fine sleep training habits inculcated with such strain, and your skin shocked me. almost 104 on the ear thermometer that runs cold. i was awake then, bolt upright, hands juggling medicine bottles and cool cloths and Web MD. 29 minutes for the drugs to play paper rock scissors with the fever and the drugs won and i exhaled but now it has been four days and i’m not sure we’ve slept since and there are teeth on the horizon of your gumline and baby girl, it feels a bit much, really.

teeth already. so fast.

and not fast enough, if their coming lets the sleep come back so i can trade this river of disjointed thoughts for rest.

baby and toddler

Originally uploaded by o&poecormier

i had no idea how complicated it would be, these two, these little lives unfolding in my house yet solitudes unto themselves.

she turns to him, all baby squeak and anticipation, oozing delight; he turns away, all toddler moody i will go this far and then no further and then repentant. he turns back, suddenly empathic, his tallest self, most kind, solicitious, and brings her blocks and teethers only slightly pre-chewed and he sing songs baby baby baby this is a little song for you do you like it baby and sometimes she lavishes him with the praise of her laughter like bells but other times there are her toes to explore and he could be the wind, invisible.

i watch. some animal instinct tells me this is between them.

he sprays her with his froggie in the tub and laughs his belly laugh and she mimics with her little heh heh heh and then she beams at him like he hung the moon and i catch my breath, full of wonder.

one of those weeks without enough coffee in the world.

3 am, 4 am, 5 am, 6 am, and 7 am all witnessed on the clock by my bleary eyes. sleep training feels like one big irony from here, a joke concocted by sadists. training me to do without sleep, is apparently what the fine print musta read. i can’t vouch for it. i can barely see.

i was quite happy just bringing her into the bed and nursing through the wee hours, dozing and shifting, the two of us a cosleeping tangle that i never intended but found rather civilized. ’til now. apparently the regularity of our round-the-clock feedings have encouraged Ms. Posey in the belief that one must also wake up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, in regular intervals around the clock. jesus have mercy. there was a point in my life where 3am was a perfectly reasonable time of day for oh, i dunno, ordering up a round of shooters, but now that i am denied such revelries i think she should be too. so i’m trying to break her of the expectation of a full breakfast at 3, replete with cheery mommy waitress. instead, we lie in the dark, swaddled and shhhhing, repeatedly inserting the reviled – by Josephine – soother while she scratches at it and me with her baby wolverine talons. quality time, that. and she’s got stamina, my kid.

last night she actually stayed in her little sidecar bed, granting the soother a haughty acceptance. i have removed all the stimuli i can think of from the experience, all the motivation…we did not feed, we did not talk, we did not rock. there were only gentle shhhhes and the pat of my drowsy, drooping hand on fat cheeks. and still she was wide awake from 3am until 5:30.

Dave got kicked out of bed and down to the couch when it became clear that the swaddle and the Fisher Price aquarium lullabies weren’t doing anything to soothe the wee, savage Iggy Pop all a-frolic in her cot. i figured one of us might as well sleep. he in turn then got up with Oscar so that when slumber finally fell heavy on our daughter at dawn, i didn’t have to watch 8 am come round on the digital display. at 8:12, she woke for good…but at 8 am i was dreaming that i’d forgotten to get on the plane for my vacation.

vacation, ha. but small mercies, small kindnesses. love in this house.

last night, bathtime for munchkins. Posey had been retrieved wriggling from the water and primped and packed plumply into her sleeper and sleepsack and we sat nursing in the rocker whilst Oscar finished his rousing rendition of do mi mi, mi so so for his bath toys and then i heard Dave lift him out of the water and O made the very same request as he’s been making after bath since he learned to finally articulate the words months ago.

tell me a storwy about Diesel, Daddy.

Oscar has a Thomas the Tank Engine fetish. to please our young enthusiast, his father and i have for what feels like a lifetime been fabricating – and massacring – stories about Thomas. the liberties we’ve taken would make Sir Topham Hatt cringe, delightfully.

but we’re tapped out. done. saturated. we’ve drawn the line. no more post-bath Thomas improvisations. please.

which doesn’t mean Oscar’s done asking. dulcet tones for the request, and his father’s firm “no” in return. a pause. then the parry, tell me a story about YOU, then, Dada. silence. the fuzzy silence that sweeps over even the most talkative of us when put on the spot and unsure if we know any stories about ourselves that are remotely interesting yet appropriate for two-year-olds. do two-year-olds like beer stories as much as trains?

ever helpful, i piped up, tell him a story about ME. i’m lots of fun!

a laugh wafted through the door. and i heard…

once there was a girl named Bonnie. she was a nice girl. one day she found herself on a very beautiful beach where she met a handsome prince.

and i glanced down at my wool socks and thought, oooh, i could love this story even though in non-fiction i am not so much the beach heroine type.

he continued, the prince was VERY handsome. very very handsome. amazingly handsome.

i began to suspect that i was not about to encounter George Clooney in this fairytale. scrreeeeeech went the sunny Thai beach in my mind. another set snapped down in the backdrop, another beach, a humbler one on New Brunswick’s north shore, and a bonfire, and guitars, and a twenty-one year old boy with sharp blue eyes and shocking frankness and a pestilent sense of humour…a boy who would lend me his old, torn Levi’s – to keep – that first night i met him. a boy who would seem to me to be the little brother i never really had for almost five years, until the kinship swelled into something urgent and less than brotherly.

and Bonnie thought she was SOOOOO lucky to have met the handsome prince…

that they both ran off and married other people! i inserted from my perch in the rocking chair.

Bonnie was very wrong-minded, intoned the storyteller cum toddler tooth-brusher in the other room. but eventually the handsome prince found her in a land far, far away, called Korea, he continued, and she looked at him and realized just how truly marvellous he was.

she had been drinking a LOT of gin, i pointed out.

he forgave her obvious flaws and weaknesses came the voice from the bathroom, trying hard now not to laugh, and then they lived happily ever after and had beautiful babies named Oscar – yes, Oscar! – and Josephine!

Me, Daddy?

yes, you, Oscar.

Oscar’s little face, pink-cheeked from his bath, peeked around the corner into the bedroom, his curls a halo. he looked at me intently, exultantly.

Mama, you have a PRINCE! he shouted, laughing as if this were the most hilarious thing in the world. then he stopped dead and looked me straight in the eye. where is he?

love in this house, and laughter.

Originally uploaded by o&poecormier

a year ago this morning, i woke up well before dawn in a tidy brown English hotel with jet lag and a faint gin headache, more from lack of sleep than excess of indulgence. i’d been circumspect, but careful.

i crept into the deco-tiled bathroom and pulled a thin plastic package from my bathroom kit and cursed the international moratorium on flying with scissors. i dragged the plastic open with my teeth, raggedly, balancing on the cold tile and trying not to piss myself.

victorious, i pried plastic from its plastic casing and peed on my prize, hand-imported across the Atlantic on the previous day’s journey. and then i perched on the edge of the tub and waited.

thin pink line. positive. and my hands started shaking and i whispered please. this time, please, let it all work out okay.

it was my thirty-sixth birthday.

like Gollum with his ring, i pocketed my plastic, uh, treasure and slipped downstairs by myself to wait for the hotel breakfast to open. a linen-dressed table, decaf in fine china, porridge with real cream and me with my journal and my secret, the only person in the world aware of the fragile blossoming within.
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this morning, i woke with a slightly less faint headache to that same no-longer-so-fragile blossom squeaking and beaming up at me.

my preciousss, i cooed. my birthday pressssent.

poor kid. every year she’s gonna be stuck with my Lord of the Rings impersonations. at least by next year she’ll be able to share in my cake to ease the trauma.

it all worked out okay.

Originally uploaded by o&poecormier

…they abound.

her whole face lights up. i’d forgotten how nothing is quite so heart-melting as a baby’s first smiles.

someday, if the world is kind, she’ll flash this same cock-eyed grin – with teeth, we’re hoping teeth come with the package in good time – to some kindred soul, and maybe the earth will shift a little for one or both of them and that somebody, somewhere – maybe someone not even yet born – will taste a bit of this smitten silliness, this joy, that i feel when her eyes lock with mine and shine. i hope that for her. i really do.

but for the record, let it be known…mama was first.

the scream

Originally uploaded by o&poecormier

for six straight hours last night, she either nursed or screamed. i bounced her. her father burped her. we rocked her and i nursed her more and more and again more, pinned under my cheery giant pillow like a museum display of Motherhood. my spine eventually curled, nerves raw from the prolonged hormonal torture that is Your Newborn Crying, but her father got me a glass of Wolfblass and took her upstairs for a fresh diaper and generally quite redeemed himself from all that thankyou card nonsense, really.

we had friends in, and eating and drinking and talking went on despite the maelstrom at the centre of the house. we raised our voices to be heard. i swayed like Stevie Wonder through the conversations, lolling my head with the rise and fall of her protests, clucking and cooing while asking adult questions with the other half of my mouth. i heard nobody fully, maybe…but i was mostly there. enough to enjoy myself, despite the fact that she was having her worst evening to date.

and then it ended in a fit of poop and the cocoon of the sling. curled close to me, she suddenly quieted. we waved our friends off. we slept…never long enough, but deeply.

i tell people it’s easier – for us, at least – the second time around. it’s partly Posey herself…while last night was rare for her, it was the way Oscar’s evenings ran without fail until he was nearly four months old. but i know, too, this time, that it’ll end. i know that i’ll sleep again someday. and i know that hiding upstairs trying to settle the baby before i engage with my friends is a pointless, losing battle, one that will only ensure that i miss out on all the wine and most of the good gossip. i know, even in the moment, that these are not nights to wish away.

she sleeps on me.

right from the word go, it’s been clear that Posey’s a snuggler, a natural bambino-in-arms. she burrows into chests and armpits with an instinctive fetal curl, an irrestibly tiny, hot package for whom human contact is a kind of morphine, a failsafe stupor-inducing comfort.

i am a sucker. Posey’s nuzzliness has charmed me to bits, in part because at two-and-a-half the affectionate but independent Oscar is still only learning to cuddle. my futile efforts to comfort him in his colicky infancy left me feeling inadequate and useless and, uh, desperate. thus my discovery of Little Miss Snugglebug’s penchant for getting cozy and peaceful when i held her flattered the ass off me. this child i can actually quiet please! worship my mothering skillz!

of course, turns out there’s a rub to this little trick. it’s not that Posey won’t sleep in her cute little cosleeper for long…no shit, Sherlock, i kinda figured i was getting in for that, i was game to reap the whirlwind…it’s that i can’t sleep through her sleeping.

every night for the two hours before dawn my child grunts like a barnful of pigs.

she gurgles and bellows three inches from my ears, her sonata of snorts punctuated only by occasional earsplitting shouts. it’s not hunger…she’s usually fed and been well and thoroughly burped only an hour or so before. and it doesn’t bother her much, as she sleeps through it – even the crying out, for the most part – so long as she’s held just right. but i cannot sleep through it, because a) she sounds like a motorcycle gang and b) i have to sit up in order to get her comfortable. her father also cannot sleep through it, because a) he’s only inches away and b) i tend to whack him awake whilst muttering curses under my breath because hell, i’ve only just gotten back to sleep and my frustration needs SOME outlet, after all. she hasn’t woken Oscar very often, admittedly – though the fact that she HAS, with no adjoining wall and two closed doors between them attests to the volume of her grunt sessions – but by the time her vocalizations have achieved their objective and gotten her diaper filled and she’s dropped back into gentle chest-snuggling sleepiness, it’s time for Oscar to wake up.

thus, there is not enough sleep going on here, folks. for me. and Dave too…but most – and oh so pitifully, i assure you, because Bon on no sleep is an ugly, ugly beast – me.

she has reflux, which medication appears to be taking care of. she also has tendencies towards loudness in whatever she does, and we affirm that around here. she’s not constipated, just voluminous, and possessed of unfortunate timing.

she’s five weeks old, and she delights me. and i have to admit i love having her little body resting beside me…love the sound of her breath, the flutter of her small hands as they inevitably break free from the swaddle. even in the dark of five am, i catch the shadowy contours of her small face and am grateful. but tired. i’m wearing thin. so…anybody have any wonderful tips which will restore beauty sleep to our little family? i tried prune juice (uh, for Posey, not me…but it just made the product of her grunting all the more watery) and i tried earplugs (pointless, due to the proximity of the noise source and the fact that she’s five weeks old and i’m not comfortable with the possibility of her being awake and miserable and alone). anybody got any other bright ideas?

and more seriously, since i don’t think Oscar’s ever slept on me for more than five minutes in his entire life, any voice-of-experience stories about the wisdom or lack thereof of letting her sleep in our arms in the first place?