The Seige

As I prepared for the arrival of the Koalid, I was ready for many things. I learned the basics of diapering, feeding, burping, and as individual challenges I was quite up to them. However, like many things we do in life, the difficulty is not in the individual elements once or twice. Running a marathon is just putting one foot in front of another. What makes it hard is doing so 34,000 times.

Being up all night once, watching Star Trek: Voyager, and periodically feeding and changing a baby is exciting and not overly taxing. But then there is the second night, the third, the tenth. After two weeks of sleeping no more than 4 hours at a time, being awakened by screaming baby, it starts to wear.

This is what the Koalid looked like
for about 12 seconds last night.

Eventually, one gets to learn the rhythm of the baby. She is sleeping less and less each night, but sleeps quite a bit in the morning. The challenge is not that it's difficult to figure out the rhythm, it's that it's difficult to solve simple problems when running on little sleep, with a baby crying, and all the rest. It gets to be like juggling while tightrope walking in a windstorm.

I am also learning a bit about sleep and the lack thereof. Staying up all night is not nearly as hard as trying to sleep four times and being woken within 15 minutes each time. Each time you start to sleep and are awoken, you wake up a little groggier until simple tasks become complicated and difficult. So, the solution appears to be not to try to sleep until the baby is securely asleep and will be sleeping for a while. It's a very challenging game of endurance and fortitude.

As I write this, I have gotten a good chunk of sleep in the morning and the Koalid is asleep, so I'm feeling pretty solid, which is good because there are other things I have to do besides watch a baby, like create a non-profit book store.