things that go mama in the night

One of my favorite things about my girls is their sleeping habits.  I really struggle when I don't get much sleep.  From an early age I made it my personal mission to make them good sleepers.  It took lots of effort, lots of tears, many nights of Joel holding my hand (to comfort me but mostly to keep me out of their room to pick them up and console them as they wailed), and several sleepless nights.  But I did it.  Sarah was a great sleeper from about three months of age forward.  Allison it took nine months but we eventually made it.  Now the girls go to bed around 6, sometimes later if they are playing with friends or family or we're out and about, sometimes earlier if they are sick or skipped naps and lose it altogether.  They wake up around 7 or 7:30 in the morning when I get up with Joel for work.  It's one of my most treasured routines in my life. 

Many of my friends remark at how lucky I am that the girls do this.  I cannot stress enough how grateful I am and I do not ever take it for granted.  I actually have difficulty breathing when I think of how things could be if they were not as easy to go down. 

That being said it takes a lot for my girls to get up in the middle of the night and make a raucous.  Allison is newly settled into her big girl bed so she now has the freedom to leave her bed and room if she wanted but we have made it clear she is not to get up or leave her room unless it is to go potty and then she must go right back to it.  So last night when I heard a desperate, croak of a voice cry out 'I want my mama' the panic that rang through my body and my heart was instant.  I raced down the stairs and found my sweet girl standing in the hallway, begging for her mama.  She had thrown up in the middle of the night.  It looked like she woke up and tried to get to the bathroom in time, but didn't.  It all landed right in front of her door...on the carpet.  Poor, poor girl. 

In those minutes while Joel faithfully cleaned and scrubbed the carpet and I changed Allison's clothes and snuggled her, I knew that I would be up for hours.  Long after Allison settled back into a peaceful slumber and Joel resumed a quiet snore I was still awake listening for any squeak or squawk or creak that might come from downstairs. 

I was transported, as I always am every time my babies wake up for one reason or another in the middle of the night, to the anxious new mama I once was.  Every sound I hear becomes a cry for help.  Every creak or crack of the house settling becomes my children falling off the bed or choking quietly on something seemingly harmless. 

Without adequate sleep everything becomes a huge deal in my life.  It's probably the main reason I had such a hard time with post-partum depression after the girls were born.  Lack of sleep does terrible things to me.  So maybe that's why my girls are so good to me, because they know somehow it's what I need.  And so when they wake up in the middle of the night a panic - I share that same panic because I know all to well it means several hours of paranoid wakefulness.  Thank you, sweet baby girls, for knowing your mama and loving her so.