Christmas is days away and by days away I mean tomorrow is Christmas Eve. Little Man has not been sleeping very well at all the past week. Call it his four month sleep regression or the change in weather or growing pains, whatever the reason his sleep has been shockingly awful. Which in turn means that my sleep has been shockingly awful and I’ve barely had the energy to eat let alone finalise and wrap presents.
I was in a video chat with a friend yesterday and he started going off. He was obviously tired and needed to sleep but refused to close his eyes for long enough to be considered even a power nap. Then he seemed to be hungry but all he did was suck the milk from the bottle to promptly dribble it back out. So maybe he wanted his dummy. Nope.
I ended up just flipping my mic up and sitting there for a minute letting my child exercise the demons from his body like only a cranky baby can. My friend took one look at my face and told me she was coming over. There were no ifs, ands, or buts. Within half an hour she was at my door taking me child from my arms marvelling at how heavy he’d gotten in only a few weeks.
To be fair the kid is roughly 8.5kg. He’s heavier than the biggest bags of dog food that you can get from Coles. More compact and somehow more awkward to carry but heavier.
She walked him up and down the hall while I dealt with the washing and folded up laundry, one basket that had been sitting in the corner for a week and another from that morning. Then I got working on Christmas presents.
It’s really hard to weed vinyl when the small child in your lap has figured out when your focus is not solely trained on them and makes you very aware of your fuck up.
I know that many people would tell me that I can put him in his cot and just let him cry it out. He’s allowed to cry for a little while, it won’t hurt him.
And look, I’m not disagreeing. There are plenty of times when he has just had to wait, and the wait has resulted in him crying for a few minutes. He’s safe, he’s not able to cause himself any kind of harm…yet, and so if it means that I’m able to get the sheets in the dryer, heat up some food for myself and make up a bottle for him, then he can cry for an extra few minutes. I know that the moment I pick him up there will be no point in me trying to do any of those other tasks. It’ll take me twice as long to get his bottle together and I’ll be making four trips back and forth to the study to bring what I needed.
Any who, Little Man’s bed time rolled around which was fantastic because he’s still catching up on sleep. Matt had already passed out while I was reading bub his bedtime story so I had the house to myself – to go back to dealing with the presents. When I did decide to crawl into bed it was around 11. As I write this we are closing in on 3am. Matt woke up around 1ish and did a HJ’s run and we both scrolled through TikTok until one of the dogs demanded to be released from the prison. That marked the end of his attempts to sleep and mine.
He decided to clean up the kitchen while I laid in bed with the dog and killed time on my phone. And now I’m here, my body feeling like it’s run a half marathon while my brain feel like I’ve snorted half a dozen lines of cocaine. I also wonder if there’s any point to me even trying to sleep at this point. Soon the tiny human will wake up and want feeding, so why not just stay awake for it? Maybe I can convince Matt to do it since he seems to have an endless stream of energy right now.
The bright spot that I hold onto right now is that I don’t have to spend the rest of the next few days being abused by people because we’ve run out of turkey’s days before Christmas and telling me that I’ve ruined Christmas because there’s no wrapping paper left at 8.30pm Christmas Eve.
You think I’m exaggerating but it’s actually happened. I walked away and downed a can of V hoping that the floor would open up and just swallow me whole so I didn’t have to deal with the stupidity for a second longer.
For now though, I’m gonna go and peek in on the demon, make sure that he’s still breathing and then I’m going to crawl back into bed and hope that I might drift off into the sweet abyss of sleep.
S.J Smith Books 