Sleep No More

We're working on a week of disjointed sleep. Joash keeps deciding to wake up at 1:30am and hang out for several hours. Last night I woke up to him cuddled up in the crook of my legs. It was Dan's night to tackle the sleep struggle, so I went and hid in Joah's bed. I wrote the following during the previous night's midnight productivity boon.:

And, lo, how the sweet always turns sinister. We switched Joash to a real bed about a month ago in the midst of Dan's marathon month of travel. He had a rough first week but then settled into his normal sleep routine. And the sweetest development was that he would come in our room and tap on my back to wake me up for the day. Two weeks out from that, Dan's back home, and Joash now wakes every day at 5am, refuses bed until 10pm, and right now, at 3:12 in the morning, has been up and in and out of bed for 2 hours. I sat like a troll guarding his door for the first half of it, and then I locked myself in my room. He is pawing at the door like a lonely dog. Quick! Someone send me some self-congratulating mother of the year merchandise.

If there are any ticks Joah's marked with precision and fervor, they are the developmental sleep regressions. In this respect he is an overachiever. And he likes to revel in the fullness of them. If an 18 month regression is supposed to take a week but could last a month, give that kid his month of sleeplessness. His main strength has always been his persistent congeniality without sleep. He is like a high functioning wakefulness addict. Here in the throes of his 2 year regression, and I'm pretty sure it's going to take 2 years for him to come through.

I am convinced there are these procreational pockets in the space-time continuum. Brief pockets of sweetness coupled with relative ease that convince you you can start the process all over again. Without.these I am certain the human race would cease to exist. Our last such pocket clearly happened in October. I imagine it will be at least a year before we have another one. And so goes the circle of life.

Oddly enough, we're all doing really well on wonky sleep. Dan and I achieved a new level of solidarity taking turns walking Joash back to his bed those two hours early in the week. For some reason it all seems light-hearted and ridiculous for now. I mean, it's got to go back to normal sometime, right? Right? Just in time for a baby to be born, I suppose.