No one wins when you're playing musical beds

It's been a week of worse than normal sleep here - the monkey has always had GI issues that cause frequent sleep interruptions, but at the moment, she's cutting two bottom molars and that's wreaking holy havoc on her sleep patterns.

So we play musical beds. I'm a big fan of co-sleeping, but my husband isn't, mostly because when the monkey sleeps in the middle, he usually ends up getting either a head or two feet in the stomach repeatedly throughout the night. Although I have a bed rail, I'm not comfortable with putting her on the outside, since I worry that she'll get stuck between the mattress and the rail. (That's really ridiculous, since she's 22 lbs and two feet tall, but allow me my idiosyncrasies.) I also feel like I should be getting her used to sleeping in her own bed, so that's where she starts out every night.

She stays in her bed until usually sometime between 1 and 2 in the morning, when her stomach starts to hurt too much for me to easily coax her back to sleep. At that point, I bring her out to the living room, and we bed down on the futon (that I've pulled out and made up into a bed earlier in the evening). She sleeps quite well there, usually waking only once to eat, and this is when I get my longest stretch of sleep - sometimes up to four hours in one go!

Then, sometime around 6 am, my husband gets up and comes out to the living room to do his mysterious "getting ready for work" things. (Even when I didn't have a baby and was working at my former job, I was never up early enough to figure out how it takes him an hour and a half to get ready for work, when I could roll out of bed 30 minutes before I had to leave and be showered, dressed, with make-up on, and standing at the bus stop on time.) At that point, I pick up the sleeping monkey (oh so carefully) and take her into our room to spend another two hours sleeping in the most comfortable bed in the house.

I've been assured that there will come a day when she sleeps through the night all on her own, and that no one ever needs to take their mom to college with them to sing them to sleep. I'm also very aware that this period in her life is so short and so precious, and that, while motherhood seems to be a long lesson in letting go, I have a unique opportunity to hang on to for a little while longer, so I'm not complaining. Mostly, I'm just recording the craziness for posterity.

And now it's 12:15, and I've just given the monkey her midnight feeding, so I'm going to take myself off to my (wonderful, comfortable, snuggly, cozy, soft, warm, heavenly) bed to try for that magical hour or two of sleep before she needs me again. And who knows? Tonight might be the night that she surprises me and sleeps through. A girl can dream, can't she?