Dazed & Confused

My baby can read! That's my explanation for the night we had last night. Miles read my blog yesterday and thought, Oh Mommy, you think you have things under control? Let's mix it up a little!

I'll give you the short version of the story, which is that everything went fine until about 1 am and then it went sideways and I'm still not sure what the heck happened, but I know that I didn't get a whole lot of sleep.

Here's the funny thing: the sleep deprivation aspect of having a baby has not been a big deal to me... like, at all. It's easy. It's nothing. I'm not bragging, I just seem to have lucked into some kind of weird ability to be unfazed by sleeping in several small increments. It's an ability I didn't know I had until I had to use it. I tend to fall asleep while watching TV after dinner, but other than that I feel fine - great, even.

The hard part is not functioning during the day, it's thinking coherently at night. When Miles wakes me up in the middle of the night to eat, I often wake up totally confused. Where is the baby? (Where he always is, in the pack and play.) Why is he fussing? (He wants to eat, like the last 4,000 times he woke up in the night.) What am I doing? Who am I? What day is it?

This means sometimes I make stupid mistakes, like forgetting to change his diaper at a feeding, which means that I will be punished by being woken up again in a few minutes by a boy with a soggy diaper (Mr. I is convinced he'll be potty trained early because he hates having a dirty diaper so much). I fumble in the dark like a fool. Once I found myself insistently jabbing Miles's pacifier into his ear. I sometimes attempt to soothe a fussy baby by moronically patting his arm when what he really wants is to eat, get changed, or get up.

Last night I missed the 4 am "It's Time To Get Up Mom!" alarm and suffered through maybe as much as 90 minutes of sleep grunting, wondering what the heck was wrong with him. When I finally got a clue and brought him downstairs, I set him in his swing and he was out like a light. Uh - duh.

So, I'm on my own now. Mr. Ibis got up at 1 am for his first long distance run with the new company. He is hoping to be back by Saturday morning. This will be my first 24 hour + period of taking care of baby all by myself. Wish me luck...