During the weekends, Joe and I trade off in manning Cal's overnight demands--usually I'll feed him, and Joe will be on diaper patrol--but during the work week, usually I take full night-shift responsibility. This is my choice because I figure Joe has to work the next day, whereas I can always take a midday nap to make up for broken sleep overnight. Well, that, and the fact that Joe is fairly difficult to rouse from sleep. If by "fairly difficult" I mean "can sleep through a nuclear holocaust." Honestly, some nights I just change that diaper myself, because I'm awake anyway, and in the amount of time it would take me to rouse Joe from Stage 4 sleep and actually communicate to him that he needed to spring into fatherly action, I could change five diapers.
Joe is also very strange when he wakes from a deep sleep in that he provides a window directly into his unconscious psyche, and from what I have seen, that psyche is almost completely consumed with ophthalmology. This may seem right and natural for those members of the [University Hospital] ophthalmology department that read this webpage, but trust me, for the rest of the population, it's a little bit weird. I finally succeeded in prodding Joe awake one night over this past weekend, and the first thing he said was, "I'll put in the baby's eye drops if you need me to." I reminded him that the baby doesn't use eye drops ("Oh, right...") but that his diaper probably had vision-obscuring poo in it. But at least the concept of a baby needing eye drops isn't outside of the realm of reason. About two months ago, however, Joe started shouting in his sleep about needing to prescribe bifocals for the dog. I'm so not kidding you about this. How could I make that up?
(Though, in the spirit of full disclosure, I did have a dream myself a couple of weeks ago that I was in the OR and left the sevo running full blast, not hooked up to a patient, but just hissing out into the room. In the dream, I realized too late and started blacking out in the middle of reaching for the dial on the anesthesia machine to turn off the gas.)
Last night, Cal was a little off his usual schedule (though who's to say what his "usual" schedule is, he's only three and a half weeks old--for all we know, last night was "the usual") and woke twice after we went to bed, once at midnight and once at 3am. Between feedings and diaper changing and him generally being WIDE AWAKE what with the big eyes and the cooing and readiness for play, it took me about an hour to settle back to sleep each time. Joe slept through it all.
This morning, Joe woke me up briefly to say goodbye before leaving for work.
JOE
Hon?
MICHELLE
Mphg? Glrub?
JOE
I'm off to work.
MICHELLE
S'nice. Work's nice.
JOE
Page me later if you need anything, OK?
MICHELLE
S'mokay. (Waking up a little more) Rough night last night.
JOE
It was?
MICHELLE
Yeah. I mean, more than usual. How did you sleep?
JOE
Eh. When I woke up, I felt like it still wasn't enough.
MICHELLE
(Unable to restrain)
Well, CRY ME A RIVER, daddy.
That's it, I'm waking his ass up tonight.
Currently reading: "Death of a Salesman." Plans to bring Cal with me to the bookstore were foiled by rain, so working my way through the High School Reading List Greatest Hits.
No comments:
Post a Comment