Sleep

He lies on his side and makes circles on the mattress with his hand.  Have I written about this already?  When he is trying to fall asleep, he makes circles.  On the mattress. This is hard to describe well.

He lies on his side, and begins with his free arm down by his waist.  Then, keeping the arm perfectly straight, he rotates it up toward his head, tracing a circle.   I think this is comforting to him.  Then he draws his hand down along his body until it is by his waist again, and the cycle repeats.

Stories about adventures in sleep could suck up the entire output of this blog.  But one particularly enraging  story occurred while we were visiting Aaron and Daria over Thanksgiving.

We brought a Pack'n'Play, which is like a fold-up crib, and the night before Thanksgiving he went to sleep in it without a problem.  But at 2am he woke up, scared at his unfamiliar surroundings, and started to cry.

I got up, changed his diaper, and fed him a bottle.  He slowly closed his eyes.  At that time of night minutes seem like hours--- about a day later he was sleeping peacefully in my arms.

I stood and moved him to the Pack'n'Play. He barely stirred.  I laid him down on the mattress (typically the most dangerous moment for reawakening) and he lay still.  Success was mine, it seemed.

And then, in his sleep, he kicked his little leg and his plastic PJ sole scraped against the nylon mesh of the Pack'n'Play wall.  It made a loud rrrrrr-rrrrrrr-rrrrrrrr noise, and I saw his head twitch.

But he was still pretty much asleep.  If I could prevent another incident he would drift back into slumber.  I kept my hand protectively between the crib wall and his foot.

RRRRR-RRRRR-RRRRRR!

I looked and saw that he'd kicked his other foot.  This was a tiny crib and both were in striking distance of the damned nylon mesh.

And now he was definitely awake.  He lifted his head, wondering what he'd heard.

I'll spare you the details of the next twenty minutes.  The short version is I failed to get him back to sleep and fumed for hours about how close I'd been.