Tattoos and Drool

And on that note, why am I still sitting here?

The husband is walk, walk, walking the baby and I’m sitting here freezing and refusing to turn the heater up any higher. We haven’t gotten to spend any quality time together in over a week ever since Sleep Is Not For Babies ‘09 hit. Although my Bejeweled Blitz score has flourished, our *ahem* closeness, if you will, has suffered. Such is life with an infant. I’m still convinced babies don’t sleep simply for the purpose of keeping you from getting knocked up again at three days postpartum.

Not that we need help in that area.

And not that we actually do much of anything when we do get that sacred, fleeting time alone. Because instead of being all, hey baby, wanna put your bike in my trunk? I’m all, so hey, I haven’t talked to you in like fifty-seven days, and I know we aren’t wearing pants, but did you know your son can fart the alphabet now? And he likes to comment on my mustache? And he’s like THIS IS NOT WHAT WE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING HERE.

I have a short attention span.

(Hey! He got her in the crib! How long will it last this time?)

Shelby has always been the Baby Whisperer. He has a sixth sense for noticing the tiniest quirks and preferences in our babies and using them to his advantage. Like, he’ll figure out that Avonlea falls asleep almost instantly if you pat her back really hard and fast, and she likes the closet door to be at a certain angle so the light hits her face in the perfect spot, and if we put socks on her hands she’ll stop being so squirmy, and she really likes this one certain song on her Ocean Wonders Aquarium. You know, the little things.

He also was always the first to wake up when Beckett would cry in the night, and he’d go get him while I was still snoring away. Same with Sawyer’s infancy – he was the one who fed him at night, sometimes so efficiently that I’d wake up the next morning and think he had slept through the night when he really hadn’t.

I used to feel bad about this, almost inadequate. I am the mommy and the mommy is supposed to be the one to make everything better and rock you to sleep and know all the secrets. Over time though, I’ve realized what a special bond it has created between my children and their daddy that he has a few tricks Mommy doesn’t know about. I have the boob powers but he has everything else.

Some day, sooner than either of us can really imagine, this will all be a distant memory. No one will will need walked or patted or shushed. No one will wake up in the middle of the night for a cup of milk or dry sheets, or a head-over-heels frolic down the stairs. Some day we might actually get eight consecutive hours of sleep again and won’t wake up from it thinking the baby monitor is broken. (At least, I keep telling myself we will. Don’t ruin that glimmer of hope for me just yet.)

Until then, I guess we do what everyone else does.

We get really good at multi-tasking. Sexytime combined with the weekly booger recap? Why yes, yes we can.