Sleep? What sleep?
It began at 3:30 am when Gleek called out. She’s been sick and needed some comforting attention. Unfortunately her call woke Patches as well. I was going to snuggle Gleek first before attending to Patches, but she told me to go take care of him. So I scooped Patches to tuck him into bed with me figuring that was the fastest route back to sleep for everyone.
Then Gleek realized that she’d sent Mommy away and I wasn’t coming back anytime soon. She cried. Fortunately Howard was awake enough to respond to her and I stayed snuggled in with Patches hoping to get him back to sleep. When Patches is sleeping he is fun to snuggle, warm and soft. When he isn’t asleep he is all elbows, knees, and feet. Not snuggly at all. After an hour of being variously poked, jabbed, and bonked I tried putting him into his crib. This lead to 30 minutes of hysterical screaming. (Which by some miracle all the other kids slept through.)
Howard and I realized that sleep was no closer with him screaming than it was with him wiggling, but with wiggling there was much less chance of waking anyone else. And we felt guilty. He’s little. All he wanted was to be with the comforting adults in his life and they’d abandoned him. Howard rescued him from his crib and tucked him back in bed with us. After a momentary spurning-of-mommy he snuggled up and fell fast asleep. It was one of those heart rending sleeps where the sobbing breaths don’t stop until the child has been asleep for 45 minutes. I didn’t stay up to wait for the sad breathing to stop, I slept too.
Morning came far too early and yet I was running late before I even dragged myself out of bed.