Date Night

First PB (post-Bean) date night EVER! It went something like this.

"59 bucks? Was it really worth it?"

"Yes, babe, it's nice to spend time just the two of us. "

"We could have gotten a front door."

"You can't get a door for 50 bucks."

"Okay, then paint. We could have bought grey paint for the living room."

"We already have several different grey paints. And the point isn't the money. We're hanging out, just the two of us."

"Ok, dinner's fine. But maybe we should just go home? Skip the movie and go to bed early?"

Face palm.

For the record, we did indeed see a movie, and I was once again reminded how very much I love going to the theater (said pretentiously).

***
Seemingly the Bean turned from a baby to a little kid this past week. Her crawl is faster. She barrels over things. She's talking more and more like a real live person. She's regularly expressing preferences. It's like she discovered a new gear. She went from a Dodge Neon to a Nissan Pathfinder. I feel like I know what she'll be like as a true-blue toddler now.

As for sleep training, there is something sort of liberating about ignoring your child in the middle of the night. It takes white noise in the form of two iPhone apps and a fan in each of our rooms. But essentially we just shut our door until morning, and retrieve her only when she fusses to wake us then. The first two nights I obsessively watched her on the spy-cam. She was just sitting there, mostly silent, for the better part of three hours. I was worried she didn't know how to get herself from a seated position to lay down. We debated (I neurotically shook Alex from slumber) whether or not to go lay her down and then leave, but ultimately decided that any attempt at comforting may just create a new sleep association - defeating the purpose all together.

So is she "sleeping through the night?" I don't know. Am I? Damn straight!

It's like I've re calibrated. I am no longer plucked out of slumber like an apple from a tree at the first sound of her tossing and turning. Now I don't know if she calls for me for 20 seconds or 20 minutes before I respond in the morning. And it feels good. Real good.

I no longer have sympathy for "tired" mothers whose children sleep through the night. I now know both sides, and the complaints cannot even begin to match those of the chronically sleep deprived, the women who haven't gotten more than a three hour chunk of shut eye in months. Sleep without consolidation is no sleep at all. So all you mamas who have good sleepers, complain only to your partners about the less-than-ideal wake up time. Or go to bed earlier yourselves. Because there's some other mama out there who hasn't made it through a sleep cycle in weeks, months, or maybe even years. And she's probably hurting, right down to the cellular level. I don't know that I would have done much differently by way of "sleep training" the Bean, but I do know that the biggest challenge facing this parent of an otherwise healthy child has been managing sleep. And here's hoping that regular nights of 6 to 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep is the rule rather than the exception.