Sleep is for sissies

Lucinda asks Kim: Yeah, but when do you sleep? As the mother of what the Tresilian nurses charmingly call a 'wakeful' baby, and then of twins, who I've just convinced to go back to bed after our THIRD garbage truck viewing before 5.30am, I think I could take a guess at what Kim's answer would be. You think I'm going to say never, right? Wrong, straight to the back of the ante-natal class for you. Any more obvious guesses like that and you'll be sentenced to 40 hours of back labour. The answer, of course, is she will sleep both when she may and when she can: that is, she may be able to sleep when the baby is sleeping, but she probably can't sleep then because the other two former babies will almost certainly need something then. And if the former babies - henceforth known as big boys, or the defendants - don't need something of her then someone else almost certain will. Chef, for instance, who let's face it caused half this sleep-free situation, or a friend will call fretting about the tone of her most recent blog about Cruella (sorry, babe, had to know you were ok!), or dinner will need doing, or the laundry, again, or there will be this overwhelming temptation to do something unrealistically pleasant and self-serving, like watching a bad reality tv show... And then wah-wah-wah, blah-blah-blah, the moment when she may have slept is gone and the next time she can sleep is ohsofar away. And even worse, I think, are the periods when she can sleep, but not for very long. Those nights when she can recite to the minute the time and duration of every catnap she snatched. Those mornings when she sits on the lounge, with a baby who's so full of milk he's exhausted his jaw and finally fallen asleep on her lap, and she's watching the sun come up and thinking If I just close my eyes right now I can get five more minutes sleep and that will make it a whole two hours for the night's total... and then one of The Defendants will appear asking for breakfast. And she will chant, as she staggers to the toaster, This too shall pass. Now read quietly everyone, baby's sleeping... mtc Bec