Yesterday was a tough one in the Franklin house. Cooper is usually a pretty laid-back kid, but yesterday was a different story. He cried when you put him down. He whined when you picked him up, then he would cry, then he would doze off. We put him down and the whole thing would start over again. Then he would get hungry. We would feed him, but never fast enough for him. As soon as the bottle hit his mouth, he began to push it away. After a half hour or so, we would manage to get a few ounces in him before he dozed off again. Holding of breath, praying, crossing of fingers -- and then he would wake up crying... again.
Finally last night, after switching him back to a milder form of formula, he took about 10 ounces in an hour then fell asleep. And he slept... And he slept... And he slept. He slept for nearly eight hours! Hallelujah!
For those of you who have never lived with a newborn, you can't possibly understand how monumental this moment was for us. I tried to add up the total number of full nights of sleep I have had since last August. I couldn't remember enough of them to come up with a total, but I know the average is around 1-2 nights per month. PER MONTH!
Funny things happen to your body when you don't sleep any more often than that. One of the weirdest is that you forget how to sleep. Last night, though Coop was sleeping soundly, Kelli and I both woke up after about 5 hours and slept restlessly for the rest of the night. Which was only complicated by another symptom of sleep deprivation: the unflinching desire to beat the crap out of somebody -- anybody -- just because you can. So far, we've restrained from physically beating each other.
So when we couldn't sleep due to our own bodies, we did the only reasonable thing we could -- self-flagellation.
Now, we're not talking about a one-man version of The Passion. But if movies have taught us anything, it's that a bunch of oranges wrapped up in a bed sheet, when whacked against your abdomen at a decent velocity, will result in severe pain and internal organ damage. What movies haven't taught us is how to self-administer a citrus belly-whacking on very little sleep. After several failed attempts and converting our bedroom wall into a giant juicer, we took our sticky, juicy, organs-undamaged selves back to bed and decided to be grateful for the sleep we couldn't take advantage of.
I know. I ended that last sentence with a preposition.. You want proper grammar? Find a blogger who sleeps all night every night.
