Pride goeth...

Last night at church, one of the Awana leaders was wandering around with her almost a month old baby. She asked if I wanted to hold her, to which the answer is always yes. I've loved holding babies since I was old enough to be allowed to do so and I don't see that changing anytime soon. But, it was lovely to realize (as I've realized several times before now) that as much as I love holding babies, that no longer evokes any sort of wistful "Awww, I want another" in my soul. Babies are lovely and cuddly and I will always hold them, but, as I remarked to this one's dad when I handed her back, "I'm going to sleep tonight."

I should know better than to assert anything about sleeping. Ever.

And last night, at 2 a.m., when the littlest began to shriek as if being murdered, those words I carelessly uttered flitted through my brain.

His eye hurt, he said. I patted and comforted and soothed and finally got him to calm back down enough to decide that maybe he'd poked himself in said eye with the Batman action figure that is his current favorite thing to sleep with. I made a quiet promise to myself that hard plastic action figures were going to be right out when it came to choice of bed companions henceforth and shuffled back to my bed.

Whereupon I found my brain was completely, 100% awake.

Grr.

At 3, when I had yet to go back to sleep, I was less annoyed that the child began to shriek again. Batman had been removed an hour ago, so it wasn't the Kung Fu Action Grip causing the eye pain. So I turned on the light and looked. His eye was maybe a little swollen. From crying? From rubbing? Maybe from trying to start a sty? Figuring that last was probably the best guess, we scooted downstairs and applied a warm compress ("It's so HOOOOTTTT. It burns!!!" Um no. It was barely lukewarm. The drama is strong in the middle of the night.) and more cuddles. Finally, deciding it couldn't hurt, I also gave him some Tylenol and allergy medicine before heading us back to bed.

Still no sleep for me.

At 4, he started up a third time. As I wasn't asleep, I just crawled into his bed, pulled him close and that calmed him right down and he was back out in seconds. Me? I watched his clock tick through the hours until about 5:45.

And then at 7:02, he's poking my cheek and asking if we can go downstairs because it's after 7.

And that, folks, is what I suspect I deserve for my snotty little response about how well I was going to sleep. I'm just betting the parents of the one-month-old slept better than I did.