I may have said how Hannah’s sleep was improving such that I could leave the room for five minutes at a time during the pre-sleeping time.

Well, we slipped some in our consistency and Hannah went back to expecting to be nursed to sleep. And she still only naps for maybe an hour. And she still gets up twice a night and is done sleeping at 6.

Ian’s on holiday this week. And last night, as we went to bed, I said, “I’m always really, really reluctant to rock the boat on nighttime wakings because she’s totally stubborn enough to stay awake for hours if we don’t do as she says when she wakes up. So generally I just feed her to get her back to sleep. But we’re going to have to go through some unpleasantness to break her of that eventually, maybe it would be better to do so while you’re on holiday and the other two kids aren’t here to listen to her crying.”

He agreed, and we made a deal that we would only argue with her first waking. If we got her to go back to sleep without feeding the first time, we’d consider that a success. And probably, we figured, after fighting with us about going back to sleep, she would be all tired and would sleep more deeply afterwards.

Which was a hilarious assumption on our part.

Attend, yo.

When Hannah woke up at 1:00, I didn’t go feed her. Instead Ian went in and rubbed her back to encourage her to go back to sleep without exiting her crib. After half an hour, I went in and spelled him, and I sat and rubbed her back while she cried. Then he spelled me, then I spelled him. And she finally fell asleep around 3:30. Yeah.

So, I went back to bed, all exhausted and cramped up from folding myself over her crib to rub her back for 40 minutes at a time.

And then Hannah woke up at 4:00.

So, whatever then, I just fed her and put her back down.

And then she woke up at 6, and didn’t want to sleep any longer. Though on getting her up, she cried and grumbled and rubbed her eyes constantly.

So, then our day didn’t go much better. At 8:30, she went down for a nap without much argument, but woke up after an hour, then cried and grumbled and rubbed her eyes. We tried to put her down again around 10:30, she lay in her crib and cried while we took turns rubbing her back until 1:00. Then she slept until 2:00. Whereat Hannah and I had an argument that resulted in Ian taking her with him upstairs while he put away some laundry, while I slunk into the kitchen to cry a lot.

After that, I just wanted to get out of the house. So we went to staples for some minor errand. Then we went to Long & McQuade to look for a Dumbek for me*. Then we got iced cappuccinos and drove down to the river, where Hannah quite contentedly sat in the shade and played with my keys until we took her home and put her down to nap at 4:30. And she slept until 5:30, then woke up and cried and grumbled at us.

So. So, yeah. You know. I feel like I’m living with an alcoholic who’s happy when they’re drinking, but when they can’t drink, they storm and rage and make your life miserable until they pass out. And then you’re tip-toeing around whispering so as not to wake the abusive drunk. And when they do wake up, they just storm around and accuse you of dumping their booze down the sink. And then you take them out, and they behave perfectly civilly to everyone else (grandma!!) but berate you in front of your family and friends.

Well, the difference of course is that it’s normal for babies to think only of themselves.

*I try not to be a ‘hold grudges’ kind of customer, but Long & McQuade pissed me off this week. I called them last Friday to ask if they had any dumbeks, and if not what it would take to order one in. The girl put me on hold and then forgot me for 15 minutes. Probably she forgot me for longer than that, 15 minutes was when I’d had enough of listening to their inane 30 second advertising on hold. So then, when we went in today, the dude in the percussion section was talking with another customer, and we stood around waiting for a very long time, while he talked to the customer, then ran off to get something, then ran off to talk to another customer. And he couldn’t spare a moment of attention to say that he’d seen us there and would be with us eventually, or something. I get, about being busy. But we were clearly in there for a purpose. We had sat down to wait. Buh, I don’t want to be one of those grumpy ranting-to-the-internet customers. So I’ll just take a deep breath, and I’ll call Mother’s Music tomorrow. I went there last Friday and they were ridiculously helpful and solicitous, they just couldn’t give me specifics because their percussion guy had had the temerity to take the week off.