The memory of sleep

(Now there's a poetic title for you. Lyricism and chat about lady bits and poo. Where else can you get that tantalizing combo, eh? Eh? I'm waiting...)

Anyway...

There's a question that all new parents fear. Such an innocent sounding little inquiry, thrown out casually by every family member, friend, and total stranger. Yet it has the power to reduce anyone with a baby to a weeping, desperate, pathetic creature, with a paranoid conviction that the questioner is out to mock and distress them.

"So is he sleeping through yet?"

Shut up. Shut up. Shut up you total bastards.

Just for the record, no. No, Lumpy isn't 'sleeping through'. And, by the looks of it, he won't be until he's at least 18, so don't ask me again until then. Or I'll have to rip your arms and legs off, then flush your limbless torso down the toilet.

At this point, I am reasonably convinced that I'll still be being woken up at 4am by Lumpy demanding BOOB when he's 47 and a bank manager. Which is a very weird, disturbing, and generally wrong thing to think (my son will never be a bank manager). But that's what extreme sleep deprivation will do to you.

Lumpy is now six months old. Six months and two days, to be exact. I was going to write a post in celebration of this glorious milestone, but I was too busy wandering around bumping into walls and having fights with my own feet. Anyway, according to the rancid vat of knowledge that is the interwebs, six months is the point at which most babies learn to sleep through the night. Unfortunately Lumpy hasn't worked out how to google yet, so he doesn't know this. Either that, or it's a vicious lie put about by evil people who should be hunted down and made to eat their own keyboards.

Lack of sleep was the thing I was most afraid of before having a baby. The responsibility, the pooey nappies, the lack of freedom, the steady haemorrhaging of money and eventual bankruptcy, all of it paled into insignificance in the face of not getting my eight hours a night. I do not handle tiredness well. Back in the days when the only thing to wake me up at night was a borderline obese cat with claw retraction issues climbing over my head, I used to get very, very twitchy if it looked as if I wasn't going to get those eight hours (and that cat found itself catapulted from the duvet and into the cupboard doors on many an occasion). Remarkably, I have refrained from throwing Lumpy anywhere thus far, and I have actually coped reasonably well. In that I haven't murdered anybody, or killed myself, yet. Though both have been threatened repeatedly, usually at three in the morning (my lowest point, when the world seems a cruel, dark, nasty, smelly, sleep-free place where the beasts of despair do dwell and gnaw upon my saggy, baggy eyes. I'm a bit melodramatic then, as well. Just a bit.)

I also know we really don't have it that bad. Lumpy rarely cries in the night, making so little noise, in fact, that house guests are usually convinced he sleeps all night through, and must think my haggard look is a trendy fashion statement - a bit like the heroin chic of the 90s. He's just restless, grunty, whimpery, wiggly. Enough to wake me up, anyway. And then, once he's awake, nothing will really get him to settle down again but the BOOB.

There was a point when Lumpy was only waking up once, at about 4.30. This was actually quite survivable, especially as he also seems to have inherited the lazy git gene, leading to a love of lie ins. But that has changed. Now he wants a chat at half midnight, two, 4am, then some more times. It all gets a bit vague after 4am. Whether it's his teeth, his age, or the fact that he's an evil genius sent to torture us into revealing all those Russian government secrets we are privy to, I don't know. Most likely the latter.

So I'm putting him on eBay. I'm hoping some government will buy him as an instrument of 'enhanced interrogation'. I'm telling you, waterboarding ain't got nothing on this baby.

Am not evil geniuz. Reallys.

Am cutes. Cutes cutes cutes.

NOW WAKES UP AND TELLS ME EVERYTHINKS YOU KNOW, SCUM!