Things change. Can you?

"The good news is things change. Babies grow out of everything. The bad news is things change. Can you?"

--Karen Maezen Miller, Momma Zen

Amelia went to see her new Denver pediatrician yesterday. She is a kind, grandmotherly woman with a reassuring air of care and confidence. Amelia is doing well. She weighs 20 pounds and 11 ounces (which is at the 50th percentile for weight) and is 29 and 3/4 inches long (95th percentile for height!). She is on track developmentally, and she was quite charming during her appointment, ripping up the paper on the examining table and babbling at the doctor.

Toward the end of the visit, the doctor asked me if Amelia slept through the night. "No," I replied.

You might have noticed that I stopped writing about Amelia's sleep. (It gets tedious.) Since we got settled after the move, her sleep hasn't been terrible. She has been waking once or twice a night, and a couple of times in the last 10 days she has slept through the night till 3 or 4 am.

But I never sleep as well as Amelia does. I have a track record of sleeping horribly on the very nights she sleeps great. In fact, the first night she slept for a 6-hour stretch, I was up at midnight with horrible stomach pains. We almost went to the emergency room. On the nights when Amelia sleeps well, I still wake up every 2-3 hours. I don't know if I am just used to waking up, or if I sleep lightly because I am listening for her, or what. The point is that I am still tired. Sometimes very tired. When you NEVER sleep for more than 3 or 4 hours straight, it wears you down.

I've been feeling okay, though. The pressure of having to teach is gone, which helps a lot. Amelia is a lot of fun during the day, which also helps. And there is another passage from Momma Zen that has helped me, too:

Fatigue is a gift. Like many of the gifts that come to mothers, it is not one you would choose, like a spa vacation, but one you can use, like a humidifier. It is a cure and a balm. When you are tired, you let go. You drop what you do no longer need and you do pick it up again. You slow down. You grow quiet. You take comfort. You appreciate the smallest things. You stop fighting.

It was rather a revolutionary idea for me that tiredness could be a balm. But it can. I tried it. It works. Just accepting the fact that I was tired, that I was not going to sleep for 12 or 10 or 8 hours straight (or 6 or probably even 4), made me realize that neither was I totally DEAD tired. I am no longer so exhausted that I can't have fun playing with Amelia, or write for an hour or two in the morning, or linger over dinner talking to Dean, or any number of other things that for months, it seems, in the back of my mind I have constantly been thinking "I am too tired to do this. I can not go on."

So the point is we have pretty much been merrily rolling along. But when the doctor then said, "You should think about night weaning. The milk at night is not so good for the baby's teeth," I felt a swell of excitement and relief rise from my belly to my chest to my brain.

Here was an out. A medically-endorsed reason to stop the once or twice a night, 10-minute interruption to my sweet dreams.

And then there is the whole thing about letting the baby learn to go back to sleep on her own. So I took it. Last night, the plan was to let Amelia learn to go back to sleep on her own. As we were going to bed, I got all panicky about letting her cry, but the plan was for one of us to check on her, and I was free to impose a 10 or 20 or whatever seemed appropriate time limit on the crying.

At 11:30, she cried out. I was wrenched from a deep and dreamless sleep. I sighed and turned over. I looked at the clock. She cried out again. I planned to go to her in 10 minutes. But in about 20 minutes, I realized I was dozing--in silence. She had gone back to sleep almost right away.

At 12:30, she cried out once and went back to sleep.

At 1:20, I woke up. I had to pee. (That's another thing I am battling--a body that still hasn't broken the pregnancy habit of peeing every 2 hours.) When I got back in bed, I was wide awake. I think I was partly just expecting Amelia to wake up soon, but something else was bothering me. I finally realized what it was:

I missed her.

I missed baby Amelia in the darkness of the wee hours, the one who quiets as soon as I pick her up, curls her body around mine in the glider, and nurses herself back to sleep.

Talk about ironic.

Baby Amelia is waking up from her nap, so I will finish quickly. The end of the story (up to this point) is that I was wide awake from that moment until 3:30 am. Amelia woke at 3:00 and was awake for over half an hour, fussing, babbling, then crying, so finally I went to her. We will try again tonight. But what popped into my head as I ealized I missed her, and also that she really does not need me to go to her, was the quotation I started with: Things change. Can you?