Dear Reese,
This weekend you get up at 5:30 am, twice, and decide you are up for the day. Your cousin wakes up slow in the morning — I see him hang out on Cappi’s lap for fifteen, or twenty minutes doing nothing but vibing with the room before joining you and the blocks on the floor.
You seem to wake up ready to go. That is until you peter out and take your first nap before 8 am, well after I’ve had my caffeine and can’t go back to sleep. But you are a good napper most days and today you sleep extra: a two-hour snooze in the car home midday, and another hour-plus nap in my arms in the late afternoon. And you still demand to go to bed early tonight. You start rubbing your eyes by 6 pm and I speed up the evening routine.
You are worn out, baby girl. Me too. I almost wish I had taken those naps with you.
I try to coax you back to sleep after that first early bottle in the dark this morning, but you are not having it. After twenty minutes lying in bed together and a rather painful (inadvertent) poke to my eye, we join Cappi in the vacation home living room. I drink a Diet Coke while you dig through the basket of toys
By mid-afternoon, we are home and we have a relatively peaceful rest of the day, though I think you might be teething again (for real this time). Or maybe you are just annoyed when I wash your bottles instead of holding you and that’s why you try to bite my bare foot (and then my shoulder when I pick you up).
A little later you pee all over me while I draw your bath and I change clothes before putting you in the water. You’ve gotten into this bad habit of waiting until your diaper is off before bathtime to urinate. As a precaution, I usually lay a towel down, but this time you are planted on my hip. At least it’s good motivation not to skip my shower tonight.
We dig into a new batch of library books before bedtime. You fuss through Room on the Broom but I think it’s a hoot. By 7:15 pm, you are asleep and I hope your early riser routine was just for our weekend away. Not that I can complain since, on the whole, you’ve been sleeping beautifully (when compared to a few months ago and we were up two to three times a night still).
And when I turn the light on in the morning, you push up on your arms in your crib and smile when I say ‘good morning’. Who could complain about that?
Love,
Mama