On sleep

Ah, for the loving embrace of sleep. How I long to wash up on dark shores and spend an eternity wandering across the black sands of your beaches. I have dreamed of sleep between the beep of the hospital monitor and the sharp and quick inhalations of breath. I have dreamed of sleep the likes of which Rip Van Winkle has not known between the soft cries and shrill screams.

Okay, yes. The point of the preceding paragraph was that all too familiar advice about parents needing to get sleep. Guess what? s slept a solid ten hours last night, which means....that I still only got seven hours because I went to bed well after she did, and still managed to be tired enough to take a morning nap. Praise vacation. I was initially reluctant to praise our lovely sleeping daughter, 7, 8, 10, for fear of jinxing the whole damn thing, heathenish, I know. Yet, here I am, writing before you right now because I am proud that s has her wits about her and has learned that sleep is a gift of the gods and without the cost poor Prometheus paid for fire. Pish posh, s says, to those who would deride sleep as a mini-death. Nay, she says, sleep is but the dream from which we are constantly awakened. Or something along those lines though the translation is often garbled.

Needless to say, I'll no doubt be awakening to s screaming in about an hour's time because pride cometh before screaming babies. However, I wanted to praise her brief three day run before it ended because I've made New Year's resolution to express more gratitude for life's good gifts. And, as I intimated before, a good night's rest is one of them.

I really do have no doubt that these things will change. You see, with a little one as small as s things are constantly in flux. Why, for a person as old as I am it takes a trip down memory lane to remember that my face once lacked so many lines. Or, I could just visit my grandmother in-law (incidentally, lovely lady, and I intend her remarks to be interpreted as humorous rather than that old spiel about in-laws)

G-in-law: (Upon seeing me) (To a group of roughly seven people) I saw a picture of Andrew on my coffee table just the other day. And I thought to myself, he looks so young! Thirty really did you in!

M: ....I blame the baby.

And so, like the silver backs of fish passing through pools of dark water time slips away. And we are left holding pictures, and memories that do not admit as much truth as we'd like. Sleep well, little s.