Last night, Lauren came over with a bottle of white wine. I partook. Then I sent Dave to the store for ice cream (for him, obviously, I mean, he is the ice cream l0ver of the family, not me! No way!) and happened to mention that I might like some chocolate chip cookie dough. I partook. Twice. It’s like I keep forgetting that I’m in a wedding in a month and a half or something! Or…maybe it’s that I’m home for most of the day, every day, and I lose track of calorie input and output and just eat and drink whatever I want.

The good news is, I don’t really gain excessive weight, but there’s a downside to that–the opposite of a silver lining is called what? A silver loophole? A silver catch?–which is: I don’t limit myself until the flab has replaced the muscle, so I have to work twenty times harder to get back in shape. I’m a long-term binger, maybe.

What am I blathering on about? So the wine and ice cream were delicious, and we got the news yesterday that our nephew Michael was born healthy and gorgeous and pretty nice and big for his gestational age (37.5 weeks, if I remember correctly), and it was a happy celebration of Lauren’s return from Florida.

Tonight I forced myself to wait until after dinner for a bowl of ice cream, and I thought, “Maybe some wine?” and then nixed it. The only reason I was diving for both tonight involved Will, sleep schedules, a musical seahorse, gastric distress, and teething fussiness OR oatmeal allergy fussiness OR gas fussiness. Who knows? When you do the math, my stress is entirely rooted in feeling conflicted about Will’s sleep habits.

To paint a picture, the boy will be five and a half months old in a couple of days. He sleeps angelically from 10-5 every night. At 5 or 6 he wakes up and eats for a while (30 or 45 minutes), half-asleep, and then gets cozy again until anywhere from 8 to 9:30 a.m. Those are the facts, no matter how early or late he’s put to bed leading up to the 10 o’clock hour.

Because most doctors think the ideal bedtime for your small child is between 6:30 and 8:30 p.m., we moved his bedtime to 8:30/9 a couple of months ago. It worked out pretty well. Will would go down at 8:30, up at 9 for some comforting, maybe up at 10 for a little more, and then he’d sleep until TEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING. Fantastic, right? Well, not if you and your husband need to go to sleep relatively early in order to be sane people the next day, which means getting ready for bed just after your son goes down and in between putting him BACK down, and then sleeping without so much as a conversation about the day.

(I’m sure Dave is absolutely fine with skipping that conversation, but I feel like we’re mere roommates if we don’t do at least a quick recap.)

Last night, before Lauren arrived, Dave put Will down when he was tired, at 6:45. He’d had a full dinner, he’d been up for three and a half hours…it looked like the right thing to do. Will woke up four times between 7:30 and 8:30, when he conked out for good. (We had to wake HIM up at 11:20 to change his diaper, in the middle of which he peed up in the air and down all over Dave’s foot.

Dave: What was that?

Me: [hysterically laughing, trying to be quiet about it]

Dave: Was that pee? Me: [nodding, hysterically laughing in silence]

Dave: Great, it’s all over my foot.

Me: [running from the room in hysterics]

)

OK, this has gone on far longer than I wanted to intended it to. Suffice it to say, we tried again tonight and it (we, he) fell apart, because of WHO KNOWS WHAT. Maybe oatmeal, maybe teething, maybe it’s not his natural bedtime, maybe random I-hate-the-world moodiness, although that’s unlikely given Will’s uber-consistent personality. But like I said, WHO KNOWS? I’m not ready to let him cry it out (at least not when he’s screaming like a banshee–maybe soft weeping would be tolerable, but alas, Will is not a heartsick tween girl, so I doubt I’ll ever get anything less than the furious screams). Do I just slip on the Hippie Hat and “go with the flow,” meaning I forget about trying to put him on a different schedule and let him do the 10-10 thing? Do I stick it out to show him who’s the parent here?

Yeah, I know. Exciting stuff. And you thought this post was going to be about dessert and alcoholic beverages. That was a mean trick.

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