No sleep til...

Monkey-boy has been around for a month already, and I can't tell what happened to all those days. He sleeps reasonably well. Most nights he wakes up every four hours or so, but by the time he's fed and changed and settled, there's only a three-hour window for me to sleep. It seems I can mostly get by on that, but if he wakes more often, the next day is a miserable shitstorm of tears from both of us. I have a permanent headache and the hand-eye coordination of a demented sheep. They don't even have hands.

The Boy is some kind of uber-human. He has kept me going for the last 30 days. I think without him the kid would have gone off the balcony and I would have gone back to bed, never to re-emerge. (Is that a word? My poor brain. I don't think it will ever be the same.)

I've half-written a birth post, but can't quite manage to finish it off. And the further away it gets, the more my memories crystalise around a few moments and feelings. It really wasn't so bad. I could absolutely do it again. I think the darkest days of sleeplessness have been worse than labour. At least you know labour has an end. It can't go on forever. But this lack of shut-eye is relentless. There's a reason they use sleep deprivation as a torture method.

V told me the zombie times lasted about 3 months for her. We're a third of the way there. Good god.

Things to remember...

His first bath at home, in the kitchen sink, which will not hold his little frog legs for much longer. The three of us in warm yellow light, the kitten perched on a stool, peering at him intently. The calm, quiet look in his blue, blue eyes.

The night we went back to hospital, exactly a week after he was born, on a different floor of the building this time. His little body sprawled out in the isolation unit humidicrib, and later, after feeding him, The Boy and I in STITCHES at the ridiculous faces he pulls as he squirms and wriggles in my arms, cords and wires and name-bands on all his limbs.

My first day alone. Hot chocolate and lemon polenta cake at the friendly back-street cafe. The Beatles on the stereo and my boy (my boy!) asleep in his sling on the cushion beside me.