See that face up there? That big smile. Those impossible-to-resist-squeezing cheeks. Those two little teeth coming up from the bottom. Adorable, right? Thanks to my wife, we make cute babies and Aurora Quinn is in an especially fetching stage.
She's also entering a much more important stage: the one where she actually sleeps.
In her first 10 months of life, Aurora has been, to put it simply, a very lousy sleeper. On a scale from 1 - 10, she's been maybe a "3." Maybe. If we're counting napping, she goes up to a "4," but napping isn't nearly as important as the overnight hours.
She's always gone down pretty well at night, but staying down has been the problem. On good nights, she'd wake up one or two times (usually at 11 PM and then 3 AM) and on bad nights, well, we don't talk about bad nights. Suffice it to say that I screamed into some couch pillows on four separate occasions. (If you're a parent, you can relate; if you aren't a parent, you are either not reading this or probably taking a nap or doing something fun with all of your disposable income.)
We weren't ready for Aurora to be a bad sleeper, unfortunately, because Annabelle had been so good. She started sleeping through the night at six weeks and was a strong sleeper until the horrendous 18-month regression. The second child, everyone says, is easier. Well that's crap.
We did all the stuff you're supposed to do with babies, this being our second rodeo and all. We had a regular routine, and tried magic suits, sleep sacks, pacifiers, and anything else that would keep our sweet little angel down for more than three goddamn hours in a row. No luck. Bridget and I eventually developed a system where she would take wake-ups before 2 AM and I'd take them after. We both got up almost every night for weeks, then months. I woke up on the couch in the basement -- with Aurora tucked into a quickly shrinking Rock 'n Play Sleeper -- far more often than I woke up on my bed.
"It has to get better at some point, right?" I'd ask most mornings.
"Yes, someday," said my bleary-eyed beauty.
Parents who suffer from sleep deprivation, I heard once, fall into one of three categories: 1, This is fine; 2, This is tough, but bearable; 3, This is an unimaginable hell. We were firmly in 2, I think, but I felt like 3 on more workdays than I'd like to admit.
It's comforting that they're studying sleep deprivation in Dads now because it's tough. The worst part, for me, was that for days, weeks, and sometimes months on end, there was no light at the end of the tunnel. When we went to bed at night, we knew we were getting up very soon.
And then, this week, as 2016 turned into 2017, something happened. Sure, we'd had a few nights of success (6- or 7-hour stretches), but somehow, some way, the clouds parted and the light of good sleep has shined on our little one. She sleeps from 7:30(ish) - 6(ish) and we feel like we're walking on air.
As parents, we know nothing lasts forever. Bad phases are somewhere on the horizon. Heck, even last night wasn't great. But for now, goodness, would you look at that face ...
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