Ode to TED!

I was planning to write my inaugural post about my dad’s clothes, folded and stacked in small pile in my bedroom: signature ragg wool socks, navy blue sweatshirt, faded T-shirts, and a thick handmade sweater from Ireland. Unpacked just yesterday, they’re still tidily creased from weeks, or months in his drawers, as though waiting to be worn again, though not (and never again) by my father.

But I must be procrastinating or exhausted or both, because I feel compelled to write instead about sleep. We’re sleeping training Maisy, starting tonight.

Maisy was the miracle baby, sleeping through the night starting at seven weeks old—not just eight hours, but sometimes a ridiculously decadent 12. But ever since my dad got sick this fall and she and I began flying back and forth to the East Coast every couple of weeks, she’s taken the disruptions as an excuse to wake, cry, and consequentially (and conveniently for her, if not for me) be nursed back to sleep. But I'm done with regression: She’s six months old now, and it’s time for all of us to get the sleep we need.

It’s funny how something so dismal as weaning your baby of night nursings can, with time and distance (and eight hours in a row of shut-eye) assume a rosy, nostalgic glow. Pippa was eight months old when we decide to nip her backward slide in the bud. Cold turkey hadn’t worked: One night she bawled for two and a half hours straight while we lay in bed with pillows over our head and tried to sleep. As if.

Like Maisy, Pippa had been a solid early sleeper, logging eight hours straight at four weeks old. I was tempted to brag, and did. Big mistake. By three months, she had figured out that if she cried in the night, her own personal milk truck (me) would magically appear. By eight months, she’d regressed to two feedings a night, and I was done. The first night we Ferberized her, going in for strictly hands-off comforting after progressively longer periods of crying, she screamed for 90 minutes. Steve clocked her progress on the stove timer, while I slept cocooned by the humidifier’s white noise. Night two was my turn. All told, she screamed for an hour and 20 minutes while Steve slept, and, desperate for distraction, I listened to TED podcasts, one after the other, in the half-dark kitchen. It was a brilliant, if entirely accidental strategy. Inspiring under normal circumstances, TED talks are positively engrossing during the middle of the night, with a baby howling in the next room.

The next morning, the  scene at our house was full-on yard sale. Exhausted, red-crusty eyes, dejected just thinking about the coming night, we stumbled around as though in a dream. All the savvy wit and wisdom I’d absorbed the night before, compliments of TED, seemed like something I’d heard once, a long time ago, in another life, completely irrelevant to the wreckage of our sleep-deprived life.

I romanticize those nights with a baby screaming through the monitor and Elizabeth Gilbert or some other luminary du jour waxing brilliantly through my computer, but in truth, it was only that one night, or maybe two, that I sat listening to the kitchen timer and a baby crying and TED talks on my laptop while everyone else in the world slept like normal humans. By the end of the first week, Pippa was waking periodically, whimpering herself back to sleep, and was soon snoozing 12 hours straight. We gladly retired the kitchen timer, and soon my late-nights flipping like an addict through the TED archives were a thing of the past.

Now we're about to begin all over again, and while I’m dreading the sleep deprivation, the desperation of hearing a tiny helpless baby bawl—combined with the unsettling realization that you, and only you, can make her stop—and the foggy morning-after despair knowing you have to do it all over again in 12 hours, I am also the teensiest bit jazzed about who’s going to keep me company this time: Van Jones, Warren Buffett, Ariana Huffington? Because once we Ferberized Pippa, I never logged on again. It wasn’t that TED was dead to me; it just didn’t translate to long quiet afternoons while the baby napped, well, like a baby in the next room. Suddenly I had more important things to do.

But here we go again. 

And with any luck and a little bit of sleep (or at the very least, late-night TED mojo), I’ll get back to my dad’s clothes tomorrow.

Later....