I Need My Neep

I'm bleary eyed and draggle tailed, tired as hell despite the fact that most nights I spend eight hours a night in bed. But for the past week or so, too few of those hours have been spent asleep and too many spent coaxing my baby back to sleep.

Well, that's just the way it is with newborns, right? But wait: This baby is a year and a half old! She's been "sleeping through the night" for over a year. What's going on?

I don't know. My baby, my toddler, who used to be a great sleeper, now wakes up some time between four and five-thirty in the morning, raring to go. I let her nurse a bit (which always used to send her right back to sleep) and she finishes up and says "Up!" And my Old Man and I groan and say "No up. Go back to sleep." And she says "No neep" in that inimitably willful voice of hers. She eventually falls back to sleep, but only after much negotiation, whispered pleading, and plying of water or other sippy-cupped beverages.

Roo sleeps in our room, so no neep for her means no neep for us. We're planning to move her into O's room when she's old enough for a big kid bed, but for now, she's our roommate. And she's been a pretty good roommate, until a couple of weeks ago. (And for you Ferberizers out there, I'm not looking for advice. We're cosleepers, and we're not turning back now. Advice from cosleepers is, however, welcomed.) My Old Man thinks maybe she's getting a molar. If so, I hope it comes in soon. In the meantime, we're thinking of starting to sleep in the guest room. Except the guest room doubles as the office, and it's not uncommon, here in the last weeks of the school year, for one of us to be burning the midnight oil in there when the other wants to crash for the night. Maybe when school is over. Though hopefully by then Roo will be done with the "no neep" phase.

She says it every night, "No neep." Roo is talking more and more these days and it seems every little thing she says melts my heart with its cuteness and cleverness. But not this "no neep" shit. That is not a bit cute.

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Most of the time, I appreciate the fact that my six-year-old can do so much for himself. He can dress himself! He can tie his own shoes! He can brush his own teeth, and even floss his own teeth! (I'm so proud!) But there are moments, when he's dawdling maddeningly or totally spacing out in the middle of a task and we need to leave in three minutes that I long for the days when I just put his damn shoes and socks on for him and we got the hell out the door in a (relatively) timely manner.

Yesterday was one of those days. We had somewhere to be, and while my Old Man and I got ourselves and Roo ready, we were expecting O. to be getting himself ready. But he was spacing out, then putting his pants on over his jammy pants, then spacing out, then dawdling, then taking a bajillion years to tie his shoes. The whole while his dad and I were advising him and verbally prodding him, a duet of parental patter that grew increasingly shrill as the minutes toward our desired time of departure ticked ever closer.

Struggling with his shoelaces while we tried to talk him through the process, O. finally just stopped altogether, screwed up his face in annoyance, and with measured emphasis said:

"Stop commenting on my actions!"

My Old Man and I just looked at each other, dumbstruck, in a mix of amusement and sudden self-awareness. We stopped commenting on O's actions, for the moment. But I thought to myself Oh my young dear, I'm afraid we're going to be "commenting on your actions" for the next fifteen years or so.

I just hope I remember to stop at some point.