After a few discombobulating hiccups (whoever taught my baby to roll over? MINUS TEN POINTS FOR YOU), we’ve finally transitioned Marlo into a regular nighttime routine. It’s not exactly perfect because she can barely make it to 6PM and then she’s done. Kaput. Like she’s been studying for that calculus final through the night and passes out, her head mushed sideways into the textbook, and her roommate has to physically restrain herself from taking a permanent black marker and writing BONER on her forehead.
And then some internal alarm clock goes off in her head at 2AM exactly. Sometimes it breaks and goes off at 1:58 AM, but that is rare, and I hop out of bed, run down to her room and savor the ten minutes or so that she eats. Then she’s back down until 6AM. And oh, is she up. She is awake and ready for the day, barking orders and not really interested in the fact that we’d like another half hour of sleep.
For the past two nights Leta has come into our room having had nightmares about spiders, and it’s always right at the point when I have just fallen back asleep. So in my weak and lazy state I just pull her up in bed beside me and we snuggle for the rest of the night. Or more accurately, she flails her arms and sticks her feet on my head. And I lie there awake resenting every sleeping person in the world.
And then at 6AM we’re all there, all four of us in the dark, mushed together in bed, Marlo trying to tell us that we’re boring and need some new tricks. The light from an iPhone is no longer entertaining. That rattle is so dumb. Please turn on the light and amuse me, slaves! So I reach over, fumble around until I find the bedside lamp, and then all four of us wince at the sudden glaring light. Some of us wince more loudly and agonizingly than others. I won’t name that someone, other than to say that if there were a prize for best impersonation of a hyena being gutted with a chainsaw, we’d have a winner.
This morning I looked over at Jon and said, well, this is our life. Our Every Day Starts At 6AM Life, our Hit The Ground Running At 6AM Life, and as Leta made faces to make Marlo giggle, and Coco whined longingly in her crate to be let out, please let me out, you’re having all that fun without me, we both laughed at the ridiculousness of it. Because as bad as it might sound, it’s just so incredibly awesome.