How To Sleep With an Octopus

Bedtime has become a bit of a tangle these days.

Not that it's anybody's fault.  Ava still happily adheres to her sleep schedule, receiving her night-night kisses and going down with a minimum of fuss each evening.  She's developed a funny rhythm of babbling herself to sleep while she rubs her tiny  pink fingers across the mesh wall of her bassinet.  That scritch-scratch, scritch-scratch has become a comfort sound to both Daddy and I, signaling to our weary brains that it's time to find a haystack and put down our horns.

And so we do.  Or rather, we begin to.

Birdbaby usually succumbs to the sandman first, then I follow suit, leaving Daddy to stare at muted reruns of The Big Bag Theory on our tiny television until, hours later, he miraculously forgets that he's awake and falls asleep.  Then it's my turn to startle to the sound of Ava's every mumble and shift very hour on the hour.

Between the pair of us, I think that Jason and I were so nervous about her oxygen and pump lines wrapping around her neck while we slept in oblivion, we had accidentally developed a schedule between us that kept at least one of us responsive at all hours.  

And so you can imagine the excessive caffeination and droning on about "braaains" that ensued during our accursed daylight hours.  I also began to notice that Ava was beginning to expect a reassuring pat on her booty every time she whimpered in the night.  

In short, we no longer liked the night life.  We did not care to boogie....on the disco round.

Yeah.

Now let me tell you about the modern miracle of tape.

After all of this ill-tempered flip-floppery, one of us became desperate enough to get smart, and the other one of us got pushy enough about dietary supplements for us to both get our sleep cycles sorted out.

Jason had the brilliant idea of running Ava's oxygen line down the length of her back, away from flailing arms and prying fingers, and affixing it loosely to the ankle of her pajamas with medical tape.  Her G-tube line usually runs in a similar direction out the bottom of her pajamas, and we loosely take up any extra length with a hair clippie affixed to the end of her bed.  That way, no extra slack is snaking around, but if she pulls it, it will give a little and not cause her to shriek in pain.  Sometimes, for good measure, I even throw a heavy baby blanket over the lines at her feet so they'll be less likely to form loops that wrap around her tiny feet as she performs her somnambulistic circus.

Once we felt reasonably assured that Ava's safety was reasonably secured, Daddy and I began taking the appropriate amounts of melatonin to reestablish our sleep cycles.  For me, that meant a wee itty dose.  For the coffee gobbler lying next to me, that meant... More.  But we still found that we could wake up (albeit a bit cross-eyed) if the need arose to let out an insistent dog or soothe a midnight baby gas attack.  

After three nights of healthy sleep, I am pleased to report that we are looking less like the Addams family and more like..... Oh, I don't know... The Beverly Hillbillies?

As long as we look healthy and rested, highwater pants and a rope for a belt seem fairly inconsequential.