Sleep? Who Said Sleep?

There was a lot of crying around here last night, some of it even from Aidan. We spent hours rocking, walking, bouncing, and singing trying to get Aidan to sleep. It seemed to be an especially bad night for teeth and nothing I did was helping. I’m not used to that. I can always make Aidan feel better; I can almost always get him to stop crying immediately, because I’m the mommy and that’s what I do, but not last night. It also didn’t help that we lost power (read: no air conditioning in what felt like a billion degree heat wave). When we finally got into bed, I found myself lying there wishing that I had a job.

If I had a job, I could have gotten up this morning and dressed myself in my pretty clothes and dusted off my heels and packed Aidan off to daycare for 9 or 10 hours and let somebody else deal with the screaming. Somebody else could worry about why he’ll only chew on his fingers instead of anything from the huge pile of appropriate teething rings. Somebody else could worry about how cranky he is going to be today after being awake half the night. Somebody else could figure out how to get him to stop biting (why does he keep biting my arm and shoulders?).

Before Aidan was born, when I had a job, I had a standard approach to the day to day tasks of life that were unpleasant or even a little boring – I had someone else do them. Early this morning (which for us was still very late last night) that approach started to sound like a good idea. I’ll hire someone to do this, to deal with the teething crankiness and the hitting thing he is doing lately and I will go back to my life. I’ll get a job, I’ll make money, I’ll talk to adults all day, I’ll keep my shirt clean for hours at a time.

In the clear light of day, though, even on four hours of sleep, all those thoughts evaporated. Aidan woke me up by kicking me in the head, and then crawled over me to stick his hands in Alex’s mouth and then we went downstairs for a breakfast of Gerber Puffs and diced apples. He’s wearing one of my favorite outfits and has already thrown his toys on the floor about a thousand times and he punched me in the nose while I was blowing raspberries on his tummy during a diaper change, and this time with him is worth everything to me.