A good moment, during these long days of his early babyhood, is the 11 pm or 12 midnight feeding, usually the first feeding of the night, when he is reliably half-asleep, and eats seriously but calmly--without dislodging repeatedly to look at my face (a trick he adopted a few weeks ago) and without doing yoga moves with one foot on my leg and his back slightly arched. He eats, I sit in the dark of his room (just one nightlight on) and look forward to at least two and a half hours of sleep before the next feeding; my mind wanders over various events of the day that just passed, as I admire the way that his silky hair frames his forehead, the way that his nose is developing a definite shape, the way that his small body feels against mine.
But tonight, just like last night, he fell asleep at 8 pm and woke up for the first feeding at 9:50. (A bad sign, insofar as last night he was up five times during the night, and was wide awake between 5:45 and 7:30 am.) So I'm dreading the hour of 11-12. I'm writing this with a feeling that I have to rush to bed as soon as possible, to be awake enough to feed him again at 11:30 or midnight...waking up three times a night instead of four or five seems like a blessing to me, when just a few weeks ago it felt like a curse. But I know that I'll get back to that sometime soon. And it'll get even better in a few months' time.
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