A regular day
Why haven’t I posted lately? Because I am no god of sleep. I am a worm. A sleep worm. And I know as much about sleep as a worm, and worms don’t know shit about sleep, they just lay on the ground chewing dirt 24/7 waiting to be eaten by the early bird.
My altar to the sleep god Hypnos is piled high with jewels and money and still he forsakes me. I’m starting to suspect praying to an ancient Greek god is not how you train an infant to sleep.
Of course, there is not much to be done, because The Baby has reflux, just like his mom (sorry Baby), so he wakes up incredibly sad because the reflux is burning his esophagus. I don’t know why it didn’t bother him until 4 months, but now at 6 months he is just sad at night, although I should say not sad enough to be outside the range of normal evening wakings. If we were cave people, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed, but in the white Western society where we must make our babies sleep better than adults (how many of us sleep easily for twelve hours a night?) by four months of age, his activities, namely waking up at night wanting a midnight snack, are slightly suspicious. He would be less suspect if his little legs worked and he could wander down the hall to the fridge and eat all the cookie dough I’m pretending I will one day turn into cookies and won’t just be eating by the handful over the next two weeks because if I use a spoon I’ve admitted I’m eating cookie dough but if I use my hands I’m just having a little nibble and twenty nibbles later I’ve eaten the equivalent of five cookies but it doesn’t count because they’re not in cookie form.
But he can’t, so he is now Bad At Sleeping, a moniker that may as well be a red H to anyone raising a baby.
Fortunately, I care zero percent because I have nowhere to go and nothing to do, and honestly he sleeps rather well during the day, and sleeps for three or four hours at night, and something about having a baby has turned me into someone who only needs four hours of sleep to function, and also someone who now has lots of time at 4am to read papers on infant sleep, which has made me as knowledgeable as all the sleep scientists who seem to unilaterally agree that we don’t really know anything about infant sleep, which makes me believe whatever I do is just as good as whatever anyone else does. And because babies and dogs are so similar, I am just going to put The Baby in a crate with all of his toys, toss a blanket on top to mimic nighttime, and poke some treats through the sides when he whimpers. Guaranteed he will be sleeping through the night by next week.
Today was a very typical day for someone who has nothing to do except raise a baby to not be a serial killer. We went into Brevard, which was a risky move because it is very close to the holidays. If there is one thing I know about small towns and holidays, it is that they take the birth of Jesus to be a hall pass to eschew their belief in the economy. Pretty much every store had a sign that said, “Closed, on winter break!” As if stores have winter break like students.
Which I suppose they do here, because they were, in fact, all on break.
So The Baby and I tooled around downtown Brevard, a five-minute activity that I made stretch for multiple hours, and wandered in and out of whatever shops were open, which was the bookstore and the bagel shop, because knowledge and bagels recognize no god.
One thing that is pretty nice as someone who is rather introverted on the daily is that having a cute baby means not a single person engages with me anymore. They say hi to the baby and sometimes they look up to see who is attached to him, and occasionally will remark, “Your baby is so cute!” to which I say, “Thanks, I stole him!”
Or I would, but I live in hill country, and if the show Justified has taught me anything, it’s that vigilante justice is alive and well and I just don’t think I can run very fast with 20lb of baby strapped to me.
I eventually made my way to the library, and it was a true delight. I adore the library. Just a building existing to give you free things, in the hopes that you don’t steal them and perhaps you even learn something, as long as that thing is not stealing books. The library is endlessly exciting because it is a repository of new skills that cost you nothing. The library was my favorite place as a little kid, and then an even more favorite place in school, where I circumvented cafeteria and lunchtime politics by explaining to everyone that I was busy every lunch period, and when they asked what I was doing, I said none of their beeswax, because back in the day, beeswax was a hardcore thing to have none of. Then I would go to the library and play Typer Shark, an excellent game where you type the words on sharks and it kills them, and also you get better at typing.
The Brevard library is clean and lovely and everyone there has a Southern accent, which adds an element of folksy coziness to what was already a perfect institution. Also, the library has really nice bathrooms, and for someone who spends a lot of time walking around town for hours so their baby can nap in a sling, this is an incredible discovery and I will be visiting their establishment again.