Starving our baby and then abandoning her

A catchy title, eh? I hope nobody from Child Protective Services happens across our blog...maybe we'd better make it private...

Well, the reason for the title is simply that on Friday evening it was made crystal-clear to us that we are still rookie parents who only by some combination of love, luck, and supportive family, have managed not to kill our child through a combination of negligence and ignorance. On Friday night we put Emma down to sleep at her regular time. She slept fine until sometime after 11 PM. It has not been uncommon for her to wake up once during the night and fall right back to sleep. On this particular occasion, Laura got up with her and rocked her back to sleep. (Side note: usually when Emma wakes up in the night we leave her for a few minutes to see if she will fall back asleep on her own. During this waiting period, Lauralee and I debate on whose turn it is to go in with her. It's usually a very civil debate, with each of us explaining what we have done with the baby that day that warrants the other person getting up with her. For example:
Quinn: "I changed her last poopy diaper."
Laura: "I fed her at dinner AND before bedtime."
Quinn: "I played with her for two hours after I got home from work and before she ate."
Laura: "I gave her a bath."
Quinn: "I worked all day today." -- this sentence signifies that Quinn has run out of baby-related clauses.)

Well, on this particular occasion, LLL dispensed with the debate immediately and volunteered to go in with her. She certainly got no debate from me, and even though I knew this meant that if Emma woke up again, it would be my turn, I felt that the odds were pretty much in my favor.

Lauralee did get Emma back to sleep, and all was well in the world, for about 45 minutes anyway, until Emma woke up again at about midnight (of her own accord, not because of any alarm clock/mother-in-law hijinx -- see previous post).

I stumbled into her room and lifted her out of her crib. She stopped crying immediately and flashed that killer smile of hers, which made me wonder if I had not just been punked by an 8-month-old. In fact she was quite calm, maybe even a little hyper. Why on earth was she awake? Diaper was good, she was yawning as if she was tired, she had eaten a full bottle before bedtime -- what else does a baby need? Interesting conversation? A sense of belonging? Cheaper car insurance?

I rocked her for awhile and she slowly nodded off, but when I went to make that tenuous transfer from arms to crib, she woke up again. So I sat down and started rocking some more. She wasn't crying at all, just very peaceful, but not drifting off into a deep sleep by any means. This was more of a "Sunday afternoon" level of slumber. I again tried to put her in the crib, but she woke up and starting rolling around and playing with the bars on the crib/trying to reach her mobile, etc. So I just let her lay there and play, hoping that she'd tire herself out and fall asleep -- yeah right. Isn't it funny how we always hope that they'll magically fall asleep on their own? I thought maybe the lamp was what was keeping her up, so I flipped the lamp off -- big mistake. Our daughter apparently doesn't like being left in the dark [writing this down on my list of things not to do in the future....check]

So it has now been about an hour and forty-five minutes and Emma seems content to just hang out but is not keen on falling asleep. What do you do with a baby who wants to play at 2 in the morning? You tag your partner. I went back into our bedroom to wake up Laura, but Emma screamed into the baby monitor and beat me to it. Laura was a real sweetheart and told me to get some sleep. I told her about all of my failed attempts to get the baby to sleep and mentioned, just before collapsing on the bed, that maybe she was hungry since she'd been awake for so long now.

Lauralee tried all of the things I had tried, including taking her downstairs to play with her toys. After at least an hour of the same gyrations I had gone through, she made a bottle of formula just to see if Emma was interested -- and boy, was she interested. She drank the whole thing and almost immediately fell asleep. It was after 3 AM. Emma had been hungry all along.

The next day was Lagoon day for my company, so we got up early (for a Saturday) and, of course, had to wake up Emma who probably would have slept all morning. After starving our baby the night before, we had to get to Ogden to drop her off with the Van Bibbers so that Lauralee and I could go have fun at Lagoon. We hadn't been there since we were dating -- and that particular visit was cut short due to a freak rainstorm that blew in just in the few minutes it took for us to go through Dracula's Castle.

Some comments on Lagoon day:

The Wicked roller coaster was really cool but way too short.

The Samurai was fun too but felt a little bit like being in a car accident.

The Colossus is still a pretty darn good roller coaster.

The Screamer, Jet Star, and Spider were all closed. C'mon Lagoon: it's not like you have a gabillion rides -- keep the good ones open!

I still love the bumper cars. Everybody smiles on the bumper cars. Next time you're there, take a look. Everybody smiles.

As with everything else in life, Lagoon made me feel old. Just a few somersaults in the Rock-O-Plane made me dizzy and even the Bat -- by all accounts a pretty wussy roller coaster -- banged my ears against my harness so many times that I felt like a boxer. In fact, after we got home from Lagoon, I couldn't believe that my body was sore! We'd been on something like 10 rides. When I was young I could spend all day at Lagoon, but on Saturday we cut out after about 5 1/2 hours, and we were both exhausted.

We came back to the Van Bibbers to find a baby that was happy, and who didn't seem to care that we'd starved and abandoned her all in the span of 24 hours.