We interrupt the interruption of the in-progress blog story detailing Charlie's delivery, because writing about drama over and over will turn this into a blahg. Insert some normalcy, at least for today.
I'm tired. Tiiiiiiired. Newborns kick your butt. Charlie may wake up twice a night or five times a night. He may take a bottle and fall back asleep. He may take a bottle and stay awake for three hours. Or worse, a bottle and stay awake for two hours and forty five minutes, only to allow you a ten-minute nap before he wakes up for another bottle. He may cry for the greater part of the night, looking at you with a scrunched up, beet-red face of anger that makes you wonder if you were accidentally poking him with a fork like a wrinkly baked potato. And then all too soon, Oliver is up, either yelling the ABC's, calling out "Mommy were aaaaaaare yoouuuuu?" or screaming because his blankets aren't arranged just right. It's 2pm before I have enough micro-naps to get up to 6 hours of sleep. And that's if I haven't showered or fed myself.
Michael has offered to do the "late morning" feeding, meaning between the hours of 4 and 6am. I agree to be the sickeningly tired monster for the feeds before then. In an act of heroism and generosity the night before my birthday, Michael offered to do all of the night feedings. When I was getting Oliver ready for daycare at 7, I checked in on them as Charlie had been fussing for the greater part of a half hour.
"Are you okay?"
"Noooooo" Michael groaned in a frustrated whine, and I took Charlie for a while. A few hours later, after Michael had his catch-up nap, he told me about how exhausted he was the night before.
"I started hallucinating," he said. I knew exactly what he meant; where you're trying to provide food for a helpless infant and you can't help but slip into REM as the bottle falls out of his mouth. "I was trying to give him the bottle," he continued, "but his face was all distorted, like a Picaso painting, and I was trying to get the nipple into his little Picaso mouth."
In a few hours, there I will be too, trying to uncross my eyes. And Charlie's face will no doubt be covered with milk, not unlike a Jackson Pollock.
I read this post and laughed so hard. So very there with you. Especially the part where he hardly napped and it's time to eat again. (Except insert that you "might" have gotten to go the bathroom and that's it. Truly. That happened to me more than once. I thought I was in hell for a few days here....) It will get better. Have you heard a laugh yet? That pretty much makes "being so tired you are hallucinating" ok, at least for me.
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