Rude awakenings

Act I

Jackson has been sleeping like a champ for the last few days (as in, 8-9 hour stretches without waking up!). The downside of this is that my body hasn't adjusted to this expanded schedule. So last night at 2 a.m., after being asleep for my requisite three hours, I woke up completely unsure of what to do with myself. I wandered around. I checked the nursery to make sure he was breathing. I remembered that I needed to fill out some paperwork for the daycare lady and spent 45 minutes downstairs looking up the info of our pediatrician and the emergency contact folks.

At 3 a.m., just as I was getting ready to go back to bed, Jackson woke up hungry. (In fairness to him, he'd been asleep for nine hours - even I can't go that long without eating!) He's always been very good about eating and going right back to sleep, but last night after he ate he kept wiggling and squirming - which was frustrating both of us.

Yesterday, it was hot. Outside was 88 degrees and our house had cooked to a toasty 75 by 3:30 a.m. Holding a baby for 45 minutes wasn't cooling me off any, either. Once I realized he wasn't going back to sleep because he was too warm (even my cold-blooded self had changed out of my flannel pajamas!), I took him out of his sleeper. I opened the windows, rocked him again, and he went right to sleep.

Success! 4 a.m. And - bonus - a nice, cool breeze blowing through the windows.

Act II

Fast-forward 15 minutes. I was somewhere in that great state between asleep and awake. I felt something looking at me. I opened my eyes and less than an inch from my face was Lucy's nose, huge eyes and ears flat to the side of her head. I mumbled something about "It's ok, Lucy, time for bed..." and she didn't move.

Not 30 seconds later, it started pouring. I mean, raining harder than I have ever seen - sheets and sheets of blowing rain (of course, in Jackson's windows, which I had only opened moments earlier). We did the maniacal run-around-and-close-all-the-windows drill that I perfected when growing up in a house without air conditioning, and went back to bed.

But Lucy doesn't mind the rain. She minds the lightning and the thunder. For over a half hour, she was as close to being in our bed as you could be with two feet still on the floor. She had herself stretched halfway across that thing. And she shuttled between my side of the bed and Chad's - back and forth, back and forth - until, exhausted, she nestled herself in a tiny little ball next to my nightstand.

I fell asleep.

Thirty minutes later, at 5:30, my alarm went off. That's the one part of that new 7 a.m. - 3 p.m. schedule I hadn't thought through.

As I told Chad this morning when we were both stumbling around looking for our sanity and caffeine, someday we'll laugh about this.