"My hand is numb."

Right now, Everett's napping. On me.

It's not a behavior I like to encourage, but sometimes I feel willing to do almost anything to get this kid to sleep. See, we're struggling a little with "nap time" and what that means to Everett. To Mommy and Daddy, that's the roughly-two-hour period that comes right after Awake Time and directly before Eating Time. To Everett, it's more of a free-form experience...

Initially falling asleep is usually (not always!) pretty easy. And once he's down, Everett will usually (again, not always!) stay asleep for about 40 minutes to an hour. This is where the process usually (but thankfully not always) becomes difficult -- The Transition! [In an old scary movie, saying these words would trigger ominous organ chords, a rumble of thunder, and a crash of lightning.]

FYI, an infant's sleep cycle is approximately 45-minutes-long. So after almost an hour of good, sound sleep, the baby stirs a little, maybe wakes up, and then should drift back to sleep for another round of restful REM. *Should* being the key word in that sentence. With Everett, this is not always the case. For some reason, after one cycle, he thinks it's wake-up-time. I've tried to convince him otherwise...with little success.

Sometimes, I resort to swinging Everett back to sleep. Thankfully, our cushy papasan-style, music-playing Fisher Price model is not one of the hand-crank-style swings of yore! Most of the time, the swing works like a champ, and Everett gets another hour or so of sleep (which means I get another hour or so of baby-free time during which I can do dishes, laundry, etc., etc.). Unfortunately, there are those days -- today being one of them -- when Everett wants very little to do with the swing. *sigh*

So I walk him to sleep. And because he seems to have some kind of sixth sense about being put down and left alone when he's asleep, he often ends up waking up and fussing before I've even lowered him into his crib. I'm convinced the only reason he sleeps in his crib during Sleep Cycle 1, is because somehow that first cycle is much deeper, sounder sleep......or something like that. Regardless, he seems much less amenable to crib sleeping during Cycle 2. *sigh*


And alas, I end up here -- sitting in front of my computer (because there's not really much else you can do with a sleeping baby on your shoulder), just counting minutes until Everett wakes up. Because he's not sleeping really soundly, this segment of his nap could last 10 minutes...maybe 15. Or he could just decide he's really pretty comfortable, which means I'm in it for the long-haul -- we're talking 30, 40 minutes, even more than an hour of holding a 12-pound baby against my body with one arm. And that's when it goes numb.