...but joy comes with the morning." (Psalm 30:5, NRSV)
Little Bit has been sleeping through the night for awhile now, but last night we decided to move her bedtime back for a variety of reasons. Namely:
1.) We need adult time! She'd been going to bed an hour or so before I did, which meant that on nights when she took an hour or two to settle down and go to sleep (a more and more frequent occurrence--see #3)...you guessed it! No evening time without a little person needing to be entertained or soothed. Man was that starting to suck. LB's dad said to me the other night, "I feel like I never see you anymore!" As a firm believer in prioritizing our relationship to make sure we can happily and healthily take care of baby, that's a recipe for disaster.
2.) Little Bit was getting a typical 3-month-old's 10-12 hours of nighttime sleep* by snoozing from 9 or 10pm until 8:30 or 9am. Mama has to leave for work by 8am at the latest, while Dad works from home, so this meant that Dad was staying up with Little Bit when she wouldn't sleep and then sleeping in with her in the morning.
So let's review: not only no adult time in the evening, but also none in the morning. I mean, I love my morning run and a nice quiet cup of coffee with no tiny person needing me and I love peeking in on Papa and his sleeping baby cuddling together before I leave for work (the cuteness therein is a whole 'nother post)...but this was getting a little ridiculous.
So.
Last night we did a new bedtime routine for the first time. Which, unfortunately, does not make it a routine yet. Or rather, we know it's a routine, but Little Bit does not. This means that for the moment, she does not associate said routine with bedtime.
Thus:
The routine part (bath, book, breast) went great!
The falling asleep part? Not so much.
2 hours of off-and-on crying, howling, sputtering, and wailing followed, during which I:
-second-guessed the whole routine idea multiple times;
-imagined I was torturing my poor child by trying to get her to fall asleep alone when all she wanted was human contact;
-wondered if letting her fall asleep alone would increase her risk of SIDS (THANKS internets***);
-generally just felt hopeless about our ability to make this transition;
-and finally beat level 199 in Candy Crush!!! (Our kid has a pacifier to make bedtime easier; we have an iPad.)
Now, I am not a generally anxious person and have been mostly laid back about our baby's ability to survive having total novices as parents. But for some reason, the SIDS bogeyman worms its way through any crack it can find and gets me every time. (Maybe because when I was a chaplain resident at a children's hospital I worked with dead babies a lot?)
Nightly bouts of hand-wringing over the possibility of an unlikely but real threat coming to pass is no way to live (see my own advice, above, to my baby re: rest). But somehow that insidious SIDS anxiety kept rearing its ugly head. So I did what I do when I can't get out of my own head--I brought in the Professional.
Last night, whenever I felt the anxiety creeping, I told myself:
"You are going to parent out of trust, not fear. Out of trust in God, not fear of the unknown. Trust that God will take care of Little Bit NO MATTER WHAT. Even in death."
Oh it made me so heart-sad to even think of that possibility...I can't even type the words. But no one is guaranteed that their child will live. And really, even asking God to make sure she lived through the night was still stoking my anxiety because WHAT IF SHE DIDN'T.
And then to get myself through the miserable part of despairing that this new routine would ever work, I repeated some scripture:
"Weeping may linger for the night,
But joy comes with the morning."
To me, last night, those two things said it all.
I trust.
And whatever the weeping looks like--literal or figurative--joy does come. Every morning. Just like Mama will show up in the morning, every morning, to get you out of bed and feed you and love on you, Little Bit! No matter how hard you cried last night.
Which is what we're trying to teach her, after all--Trust. And Joy. Even when Weeping lingers.
PS Great song about God caring for babies here.
*Thanks, Google, for that info. Does anyone else parent via Google? Much more mobile and faster than a parenting book and has helped me find some great sites that rely less on scare tactics and advocate lower-intervention or more homeopathic stuff than some of the books we've received (I'm looking at you, What to Expect...).
**If you get that reference I will mail you a bottle of Bailey's. Also, yes I am a pastor and I cuss. Not in church, though (usually). Because cussing--or not--doesn't make you any less--or more--Christian. After all, Jesus got accused of blaspheming more than once.
**My wise friend Emily gave me this gem when I had gotten into the habit of reading about SIDS on the internets just before bedtime (which, FYI, is the WORST IDEA EVER): "The internet doesn't have children!!" This is now my mantra when my aforementioned Google-parenting has gone overboard.