We’ve Created a Monster
We are 6 weeks out from the due date of baby girl number two. We are excited, we are feeling blessed, and we can’t wait to see Nora as a big sister. But mostly, we are nervous. We are nervous because we’ve hit a nice little groove as a family and now we are about to throw into it the wrench of the newness.
Speaking pre-pandemically (is that going to be a thing?) our lives had fallen into a great rhythm during the week: breakfast, Nora off to preschool, home for a 2 hour nap, quick activity in the afternoon, dinner, bath, sleep 12 hours, repeat. Even now, in the era of EVERY SINGLE GOD FORSAKEN DAY LOOKS THE SAME, where weekdays blend into weekends, Marches blend into Junes, and things that happened yesterday actually happened two weeks ago, even now we can rely on one thing: Nora is going to sleep great.
How did we get such a great sleeper, you ask? Well, candidly, we are lunatics. Complete morons. We ignored every bit of professional suggestion and friendly advice. Vacuum while the baby is sleeping? Never! Make some noise in the hallway during naptime? In your dreams, buddy. Get her used to sleeping amongst the chaos? Not in this house. After the first 3 months of her life when she was not such a great sleeper (more on that in a later post) we took some extreme steps. We created absolute perfect sleeping conditions for Nora – blackout curtains, towel with pushpins behind the blackout curtains, ceiling fan, sound machine, additional floor fan – yeah, psycho mode.
And those are just the conditions we create at home, wait until you read the next few sentences about our travel accommodations before you call the authorities. According to Meredith, if it has an air vent, it’s fair game. Nora has slept in:
1) a bathroom,
2) a not-quite-walk-in closet,
3) a home gym,
4) a handicap shower (which was more like a bunker or wind tunnel with her noise machine),
5) in a nook of my childhood bedroom after my dad fashioned a curtain rod and blanket situation into their walls,
and worst of all,
6) in Austin, Texas when we got a suite at the hotel in order to give Nora the master bedroom and pull the king bed mattress out into the living room for Meredith and I to sleep on. It’s madness.
Now we are headed just like Elsa in Frozen II, into the unknown (I know, I hate myself sometimes). In a few short weeks we will be reintroducing nighttime feedings, diaper changes, spitting up, moans and grunts and coos and everything babies do, it will all be happening in the room right next to Nora. We aren’t so much worried about the sleeping patterns of baby girl #2, but can’t help but wonder if we will be starting from scratch with Nora. What happens if she regresses? How do we get her sleep pattern back? We can’t possibly add another sound machine, can we? I mean seriously, CAN WE?
