You know how the new baby is supposed to keep everyone awake at nights? In my experience that isn’t really how it happens. He wakes up to eat, I feed him, he goes back to sleep. Everyone else can sleep through this process. I’ve seen it firsthand. You know what nobody can sleep through? Shenanigans.

Last night I woke up at 2:30 to feed Keeghan and there were three people in my bed. Fortunately, Keeghan had not Apparated again. Instead, Ian had come and gotten into our bed. When he wakes up at night he has a tendency to snuggle up to Michael on the opposite side from me because he knows Michael won’t wake up and he’ll get to “snuggle” in our room. Because he also knows that if *I* wake up, I’ll go to his room to “snuggle” and leave when he falls asleep.

At any rate, I decided to go use the “good” chair to feed the baby, since no one was using Ian’s room. While I was in there, Ian came back in his room and got in his bed, and I though, “everyone wins! Let’s have cake!” So when I was finished feeding Keeghan (okay, when I woke up in the chair and he was asleep instead of eating) I put him to bed and went to my room. Where I found Ian sacked out on my side of the bed, using my pillow.

So I tried to force myself into my own bed, which was met with squirming, kicking, and protestations that there “is no more rooms for me!” from my son. The commotion, which may or may not have included a command from the Mean Mommy to “kick me again and see what happens,” prompted Michael to take Ian to his own room to “snuggle.”

When Keeghan woke up 10 minutes later, he and I laid down in “our” bed to nurse.(Yeah, he’s having trouble staying awake for this 3 am feed. I hope it means that the 3am days are numbered, and not that he’s going to get into the habit of cluster feeding at 3 am.)I had started to get really teed off by the whole bed circus thing and then… I nuzzled his fuzzy baby head with my cheek. How is it that with all the technology in the world we’ve never once rivaled a fuzzy baby head for sweet, relaxing sensations? It’s like Mommy Crack. I can’t get enough.

And Ian came wandering out of his room. He went to the bathroom. He went back in his room. I heard indistinct voices and thumping. And a few minutes later he came out again on an unknown errand. On the upside, all this excitement kept me from falling asleep and failing to return the baby to his room. Once I did get Keeghan back to bed things had quieted down in there, so I stuck my head in and found… Ian wandering around his room while Michael slept in the “good” chair.

I tried to talk Ian into going back to bed but he refused to do so as long as Michael was in the chair. So I called Michael’s name to wake him and alert him to the situation and he replied, “What do you want me to do? I’m trying to sleep!” Which went over really well since I’d been up, unless I had missed one, five times in one hour. So, anyway, after another visit from the Mean Mommy, they shut Ian’s door and spent some more time working it out while I tried to figure out if I was too hungry to sleep or too sleepy to eat. Sleep won.

So today we will embark on Operation Giant Frog Chair. Right after we appease the Mean Mommy with an offering of Krispy Kreme. Stay Tuned.

So, you know there is a chair in Keeghan’s room, right? And you probably also figured out that the idea is that I would be nursing the baby in that chair. There’s only one problem.  Have you ever heard of the fact that restaurants have something called “15 minute chairs” to encourage turnover? Well, as far as I’m concerned, that chair is a 10 minute chair. I cannot comfortably relax into it to nurse the baby at night. It’s either the crick in the neck because the back is at the wrong angle or the fact that the arms are the wrong distance apart so I have to contort myself into a hunchback to keep the baby from “falling off.” So I try to “rush” him, which means he doesn’t get enough to eat to encourage his healthy sleep habits. (In other words, he wakes up every hour until I go crazy or take him to bed with me and let him nurse for the rest of the night.) The end result is, I don’t like it, he doesn’t like it, and we both just want to go kick everyone out of “our” bed so we can nurse and be happy.

As for co-sleeping, I LOVE the snuggles but I sleep WAY too deeply for me to feel this is a safe for Keeghan. In fact, the night before last I woke up in the middle of the night with the baby in my bed and did not know how he got there. Either I’m sleepwalking, which is not out of the realm of possibility but works pretty much on auto-pilot, or the kid can Apparate. Of those two possibilites, I hope I’m sleepwalking. But this means that even my unconscious mind has rejected that chair.

Plus, try explaining to the four year old why the BABY can sleep in your bed, but HE can’t. Yeah, you can’t, can you? So pretty often I wake up singing…

“And the little one said, ‘roll over, roll over,’
and they all rolled over and one fell out with a terrible shout
please remember to tie a knot in your pajamas…”

The upshot is that I’m going to have to save us all by moving the “good” nursing chair from Ian’s room to Keeghan’s. The PROBLEM is that Ian knows that chair as “his” chair. And so far bribery and negotiation have not worked. So now it’s time to try deviousness and trickery. I’ll keep you posted.