Ebb and Flow
Friday, October 16th, 2015From Friday Mom – Erin:
Some days it seems as though Charlotte is well beyond the early-baby stages. She’ll crawl around, engage actively with her surroundings, flail her arms in her best efforts to communicate her wants and desires, and generally act like a little person. She’s largely back to sleeping through the night without waking, and she has started eating more and more solid food. She is fiercely independent, except when she craves affection or is overly tired, at which point she clings to me like silk on a dry January day.
But then there are the random nights during which she cries out like a newborn in a fit of uncontrollable tears or frustration.
I have long since resigned myself–well before Rory was even a year old–to the fact that the few times that you really, truly, need your children to cooperate from a schedule perspective are the precise times that everything will go wrong. On Wednesday of this week, a day during which I was to be presenting on a panel at an all-day bar association conference, Charlotte decided that she would wake up at 4:30 am and demand to be held until finally falling asleep 45 minutes later. She finally nodded off around the time that I am usually getting in the shower. Meaning that my day effectively began at 4:30 am. I slogged through my all day conference and then an evening networking event on adrenaline and caffeine and the gratitude that it was only a single-day affair.
The good thing about second children is that you have the perspective to know that it gets better– that they become more independent, and that, although their needs shift and change and the demands grow greater with time, the sleep deprivation of these early months is in large part short lived. Thank goodness for that!
