"Oh you're a Marmelous Pie!" said the Small Girl to her Very Small Brother yesterday morning when she woke up. It was all very well for her to say this; she hadn't been woken by him at the crack of dawn.
The Very Small Boy is going through a phase of waking at 5.00am at the moment, and despite our best efforts, we simply cannot persuade him to go back to sleep. By the time he has been fed and changed and had a play and gone back down for a nap, it's 7.00 and the Small Girl is banging on the wall ready for her milky drink. It's lovely for DH and I to have a couple of hours of quality time alone with him - it's just a shame that it all has to happen quite so early in the morning. I really oughtn't to complain though - he is marvelous at going to bed, and he does sleep through the night.
The first time the Very Small Boy "slept through", at only nine weeks old and before he had moved into a room of his own, I spent a sleepless night lying very still in bed and holding my breath so I could hear that he was breathing himself. Overnight, he had gone from waking twice a night for a drink, to not waking until morning, and the reason for this was clear: he had Found His Thumb. The thumb trick doesn't always work though; the way that the Very Small Boy gets his Very Small Thumb into his mouth demands so much concentration on his part that if he is overtired, it is simply beyond him. First, he slowly lifts his arm up over his head, then brings it down sideways so that it is lying across his face. Then, with little dark eyebrows wrinkled and lips pursed in concentration, he slowly drags his hand across his face until his little thumb is level with his mouth; with any luck, the thumb goes in and he's soon drifting off to sleep.
However, for some reason known only to him, the Very Small boy only naps during the day for 45 minutes at a time. I am frankly too terrified to look up the "solution" to this nap-related problem in one of my many baby manuals; after the Small Girl outgrew her babygros, I vowed never to look at a baby book again. They all give such conflicting and guilt-inducing advice that you end up crippled with insecurity and unable to make a decision for yourself (no doubt it would be all my fault that the Very Small Boy only sleeps for 45 minutes and if I had paid more heed to the advice in Chapter 2, I would never have got myself into this mess in the first place).
I remember clearly that the Small Girl also had a phase of getting up unfeasibly early in the morning when she was Very Small. Each time I heard her starting to fuss at 4.30 or 5.00am, my heart would sink and I would think "I can't possibly do this again". We lived in Bombay at the time, and I would take her out in the dark onto the balcony with a coffee (there is something incredibly comforting about a hot coffee at that time of the morning). Sitting in her bouncy chair, the Small Girl would beam up at me with her gummy smile and together, we'd watch the sun rise over the rooftops. As beautiful green parakeets screeched about the hazy early-morning sky, we'd be cheered by the exotic sounds of the city coming alive, and filled with hope for the day ahead.
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