I Chose Joy

I am currently in the throes of the "dreaded" four-month sleep regression. If you have an infant who is less than four months old and you haven't heard of this term, google it. Then you can be angry that I ruined your state of blissful ignorance. Little guy is now 5 months, but we are still deep in the dark depths of sleep regression. My sweet little dreamy baby boy sometimes only wakes up twice a night. Those nights are, for lack of a better adjective, absolutely awesome. Blissful. Lovely. Sometimes I even get to sleep for three or four hours in a row. However, more often than not, he wakes up more than twice a night...more like 4, or 5, or 7 times a night. Or sometimes, like last night, I lose count of exactly how many times he wakes up.  On nights like this, I inevitably give in and go "sleep" in the bed in his room, bring him into bed with me, and the entire night is spent in strange half-awake, half-dreamy, half-hour stretches of sleeping, comforting, breastfeeding and, often, crying (who is actually crying is anyone's guess).

Now before any of my "followers" (ha. I know there are none of you out there) start in on me for sleep training, or not sleep training, or weaning, or not weaning, or co-sleeping, or not co-sleeping, just stop. I'm not going to sleep train at this point or ever (that's a issue for another post, perhaps) and I'm not going to stop breastfeeding on demand. I'm also not going to start exclusively co-sleeping. This post isn't about any of those issues. It's about how I am choosing to handle our current state of regression (as a statistician, I find an odd bit of pleasure that I am languishing in a state of regression, but I digress).

There have been lots of articles and posts as of late about enjoying every moment of your children's childhoods. Conversely, there are have also been lots of articles and posts as of late about how it is impossible to enjoy every moment of your children's childhoods, and how that's ok. Maybe they have always been out there and I just didn't care because I didn't have children. Who knows? All I know is that I have seen lots of articles and blog posts on these topics recently.

What I do know is that I have a lovely, sweet, smart little toddler. She is my shadow, my twin, my absolute, take-my-breath away joy. All I want to do is smother her in kisses and spend all day snuggling her. But, alas, she has no interest in all day snuggles. She wants to "run all around the house." She wants to play outside; she wants to "eat, eat, eat!" Sometimes, when I put her down for a nap, she asks me to lie down next to her. That lasts for about 2 seconds before she starts wiggling around and asking to play. Apart from those rare, short occasions she is a busy, on-the-go little girl. Her sweet baby snuggles are a thing of the past. And that is sad.

I also know that I have an adorable little five-month old who, for some reason, has decided that sleep is not his favorite thing.  Nursing, on the other hand, IS his favorite thing. There is nothing my little boy likes more than snuggling up with his mommy, in the peaceful stillness of the night and enjoy some warm milk. His tiny little hand grasps around wildly in the air until I offer him my hand, and he closes his little fingers over mine, closes his eyes and nurses until he falls back into a peaceful sleep (for another hour or so until this routine begins again). Its all very sweet and lovely until I remember that I need to work in the morning, and that toddlers DON'T sleep in. There have been a few, several, many nights when I tearfully exclaimed to my husband that I just "can't do it any more!" I'm not going to claim that I enjoy every night-waking, because honestly there are A LOT of them, and sometimes (read: all the time) I'm really tired.

However, I'm also not going to remove the quotes from the word "dreaded" in my first sentence. I know everyone tells you to enjoy these moments because they go by too quickly. They told me that with my first baby, and I believed them in that weird I-can't-really-fathom-what-you're-telling-me-because-I-haven't-been-there kind of way. But now I have living, breathing, running proof that babyhood is finite. That someday soon I will have two children who are just too busy to snuggle, and who crash into their beds at night, exhausted from running and playing and learning all day, and who have no need for their mommy's breast and warm, milky comfort.

So when I hear cries through the monitor only 45 minutes after I last returned to my warm bed (and I (may or may not) take my frustration out on my husband) and I stumble into his room, frustrated, and feel his warm little body relax as I pick him up and hold him close, I decide to chose joy instead of frustration. I may wake up grumpy because I saw pretty much every hour on the clock the night before, but once I get into the shower and take a deep breath, I decide to chose joy instead of anger. On those rare occasions when he is inconsolable, I look at his face and I decide to chose joy, even though all I am getting in return is angry wailing. Joy because I get to experience his babyhood. Joy because I get the privilege of holding a tiny infant who wants nothing more than to be held, by me. Joy because right now, I can fulfill his every need by doing nothing but holding him close and smelling his sweet, baby smell. Joy because even when he is upset, he is mine, and I have the honor of witnessing his life and his every emotion. It doesn't mean I love getting up all the time, it doesn't mean I don't wish I could get a full nights sleep, it doesn't even mean I have to enjoy every middle-of-the-night feeding. It simply means that I'm accepting that this is the way my life is right now, so instead of being upset about it, I choose to try as hard as I can to find the joy in it.

I may never have another baby, but I have one right now, and in an instant I won't. So I  choose to spend this time with him being full of joy, even through the "dreaded" phases. Tired, but joyful.