accenting life: wake me up

We are undergoing a transition in our household, now that Joe is going to start his new job in less than two short weeks. We are excited at the opportunity and we are bracing for the challenges ahead.

For the past few months, since I have been back to work and Joe remained at home, he had primarily taken the night time duty with our girl, so that I can get somewhat decent sleep for the following working days. The weekend nights are mine though, and because they are so far and few in between, I really don't mind the waking up in the middle of the night feeding and changing. Rather I took those opportunities to connect with my girl, no matter how half-sleepily.

We are adjusting for the hectic that is awaiting on the horizon, while allowing ourselves the freedom to enjoy and bask in the all the possibilities of the future that our little heads could spin. We know that once the two of us hold full time jobs, our daughter would also have to adjust as we adjust, but for now, we think about what the influx of the extra income would do to our saving, we think about the vacation we could finally start to save for and eventually take in the near future, we think about what else we can shoulder now that that huge rock of worry over finances had finally been lifted. We are a young family trying to figure out this life, this marriage, and this parenthood.

So to prepare for the changes ahead, I have been taking duty a few more nights a week with our girl. And while we had tried to train her to sleep in her crib, we can now officially say that we had given it up due to various reasons, two being that she doesn't like it and I like to have her in my bed next to me too much. So we choose our battles, and this is one of the ones I'm willing to lose.

This morning in particular, our girl woke up quietly way before my alarm is scheduled to ring. While I was a bit annoyed, I obliged and woke up with her. Despite being annoyed just seconds earlier, her sweet sleepy smile with sleepy eyes to match turned my frowns upside down. So, we went through our usual routine, changing her, making her a bottle, and feeding her right there in our bed with her lying at the crook of my arms.

My girl has this ability to smile with her eyes that only her dad and I have been privy to, that sweet smile with her eyes though her mouth is obstructed by a binky or a bottle that just melts our hearts. She gave me one of those this morning with a bottle in her mouth and the darkness still thick in our room. I smiled back and we went back to what we were doing, her sucking that bottle down like it was her last meal and I sucking the last little sleep left before the alarm begins to blare.

Unlike other nights where she would instantly fall back asleep as soon as that last drop of milk was had, my girl would not fall back asleep and continued to. Now armed with a newly acquired ability to crawl, she begins crawling around in bed, rubbing and molding her little body perfectly to my curves until she finds a good comfortable position to lay down her head, she would rest there for a few minutes, eyes wide open, willing me to open my own eyes. After a few minutes, I am now defeated and accepted that I would not be allowed to get those few minutes of sleep after all, I opened my eyes, remained lying and begin engaging with my wide-awake girl.

She lays her head there across my chest, her chest on the side of my body, and her now amazingly long body awkwardly dangles off of my own body. But at last, she seemed to have found her comfortable spot there after all, no matter how awkwardly looking it is, and remained still there, still wide awake. I look down at her, smiled at her unruly hair and grape-sized eyes. Her mouth slowly turned crooked, and she smiled up at me. I whispered my soft "I love you" and there we fell asleep for another precious hour.