Down with Progress

Leah and Riley turn eight months old tomorrow, and of course every month brings a whole bunch of new milestones and changes in behavior. Now I love a good baby milestone as much as the next guy, but I’m discovering that with every cool milestone there seems to come a bunch of hidden drawbacks that I hadn’t considered.

Like the girls are eating all kinds of solid foods now, which is fun and cool and cute and everything, but the whole dietary shift has Leah’s digestive system a little befuddled so that she is now experiencing near-daily bouts with painful constipation. Or the girls have recently become great sitter-uppers, which is awesome because they can now play with all their toys more easily, but once in awhile when they're sitting they become so entranced by the toy they’re holding that their sitting-up muscles kinda forget what they’re supposed to be doing, and we watch helplessly as they tip over in slow motion like the last bowling pin and unceremoniously bonk their head on the floor.

And I suppose this isn’t exactly a “milestone”, but for the past five nights in a row, Leah and Riley have both slept through the night from about 7:15 pm to 6:15 am without any intervention from mommy and daddy. The girls have actually been pretty good sleepers for awhile, but typically Riley would start complaining once or twice or three times a night and somebody would have to briefly wake up to put the pacifier back in her mouth. That “somebody” would usually be the lighter sleeping parent, aka (ahem) Daddy.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. It sounds like a drag to wake up twice in the middle of the night, stumble over to the nursery, find Riley’s pacifier in the dark, and stick it back into her mouth, but I really didn’t mind at all. Actually, upon hearing Riley start to complain, I would eagerly leap out of bed before Kathy ever had a chance to wake up. Why? Because Riley is actually at her peak of cuteness when she’s awake in the middle of the night. When I walk in there, Riley’s face lights up with the light of a thousand suns and a huge grin spreads across her face and she does this little ecstatic dance of joy within the confines of her sleep sack. I put the pacifier in her mouth, and she looks up at me with this grateful, content, peaceful expression that I almost never see in the light of day. It’s frickin' awesome, I tell you.

Because Riley has not woken us up in the past five nights, my best guess is that Riley has figured out how to find her own pacifier and put it back in her mouth. Which is awesome, because mommy and daddy have gotten to sleep uninterrupted through the night (bladder permitting) for the past few days. At the same time, part of me is crushed that my nightly moment watching Riley’s dance of joy might be going away. Totally crushed.

Progress: It’s awesome, but it kinda sucks.

Of course, now that I've blogged about it, karma will now cause Riley to wake me up eleven times tonight. Just you watch.

And here's another fleetingly precious moment from a couple weeks ago: