A Dream - perchance, to sleep

At about seven months, the twins went to one feeding per night.  We expected that it would improve, but they've stayed there.  Waking up once around 2am and then falling back to sleep isn't bad, all things considering.  However, it did inspire the following conversation between George and I this evening as we sat down for our first dinner together in perhaps three weeks:

G:  Hi, I'm G
Me:  Don't I know you from somewhere?
G:  From bed.  You know me from bed. 
Me:  That's right!  You're the one I tell to feed the baby!
G:  You tell me it's my turn.
Me:  And it usually is.

It's true.  We do take turns.  I'm usually the first one woken by the monitor whereupon I turn to G to see if he would be interested in feeding a baby.  Although I try to take an unreal snore as interest, it rarely ever is.  As I result, I often take the first baby of the evening and G takes the second.

However, the first baby is usually Hen.  Where Ty goes peacefully back to sleep after the bottle, rolling onto his stomach and cuddling into the corner of the crib, Hen screams the moment he gets close to those imprisoning white bars.  Previously, I had gotten into the habit of hauling Hen into the master bed and "sleeping" him back to sleep.  This involves putting him on my arm and going to sleep, under the theory that someone so small must go to sleep when closely held by someone so big doing the same thing.  Like yawns, goes this theory, sleep is contagious.

And...it worked...for a time.  However, for the last two weeks, Hen has been getting into our bed and doing everything but sleeping.  He's been grabbing at my nose, pulling my hair, climbing up on the pillows, and screaming.  If you've been short on sleep for almost a year, the last thing you want in your bed is screaming about two inches from your ear.

Two nights ago, we decided to discontinue bringing Hen into the bed and start putting him back in his crib after the late-night bottle, as much as he protests.  The theory goes that he's not hungry.  He can't get hurt in the crib and he needs to sleep.  We keep the monitor on low for Ty, but we let Hen figure out how to get back to sleep on his own.  The first night, Hen got into a scream cycle, so I had to go into the nursery several times, but the second night was much better.

I'm sorry to see the "sleeping" go.  I didn't become comfortable sleeping right next to the boys until they were three months old and now I find myself missing it.  However, the boys, especially Hen, are moving out of infanthood and becoming toddlers.  Henry's body has become less pliantly baby-like.  Try to sit him down when he doesn't want to and he sprouts angles and oppositions that he didn't have a few months ago.  It's subtely changing our relationship to him and the looming work of real parenting, of saying no or yes instead of blindly answering a need, makes me blink.

Hopefully, as we enter into this work, we'll be able to get a little more sleep.  Just a little ......