Oh, Miss Kavya killed us…

Oh, Miss Kavya killed us last night. We put her to bed at 11 p.m., and she drank a full six ounces of milk at a go, the most she's ever done, so we had high hopes that she would sleep a nice six hours afterwards. But no. At 2 a.m., she was wide awake, howling for milk. She screamed for five minutes, fell asleep for five minutes, then woke up and screamed for another ten minutes. I finally managed to get her back to sleep through a combination of binky, cuddling, and singing lullabies, all of which of course took a lot longer than just feeding her the damned bottle would have. But we are resolute (barely). She slept 'til 4:40, which we declared 'long enough!' and we gave her milk then. Hopefully tonight will be better. Sigh.

As a result, slow start this morning, but we did eventually manage to get going. Around 10:30, I left Kavi with Kevin and came to Starbucks. One venti chai and three madeleines later, I have churned through a whole mess of backlogged work, including some course descriptions for Northwestern and many many e-mails. I also did a fair bit of work on the SLF -- it's time to get both foundations more actively up and running again. Expect various posts from me about the SLF later today.

Kevin's staying home with baby today so I can get more caught up. Jed's joining me shortly for lunch, and then I'm hoping to switch to writing. I want to finish this set of revisions on the YA novel and get it out to workshop today, so they have almost two weeks to review the 40,000 words I'm sending them. Poor munchkins. I told them to only read as much as they can easily get through, and I'm hoping that since it's YA, it'll be a fast and easy read. Fingers crossed.

3 thoughts on “Oh, Miss Kavya killed us…”

  1. We had a similar episode with our baby with the howling. I read somewhere that it may due be a growth spurt and I think in my baby’s case it was because we had a few rough nights and then things got back to normal. Hopefully that’s the case with Kavi too.

    A question slightly off the topic – do you put Kavi to bed (for e.g. rock her to sleep) or put her in her crib and let her fall asleep on her own? I’ve done the latter with my baby…I guess, just because it felt right..and these days, when I try to put her in the crib by herself, she ends up banging her head on the rails or some such thing and that is more stressful. Just curious what you do and why.

  2. Hi again Mary Anne,

    I do feel very inspired to read of how you carry on with your work as a writer, even as you adapt to the demands of motherhood. Your life continues to be vibrant although the journey now feels different.

  3. Mary Anne Mohanraj

    Avril, we’re in the midst of changing our methods. Up until last night, Kavi has been co-sleeping with us, mostly because it seemed easier to roll over to feed her rather than getting out of bed a couple times a night. But two nights ago, we realized that she was clearly particularly outraged by waking up to find us RIGHT THERE and STILL not giving her the milk she demanded. So last night we tried putting her in the crib, and even though it was definitely a pain getting up to feed her, she slept longer than she ever has in bed with us. We used to hold her (not really rock her) until she fell asleep, sometimes with food or singing. But last night we just fed her and then put her down in the crib, and she went to sleep pretty quickly on her own, without any yelling. So hopefully, we’ll continue with this and it’ll keep working. We do kind of miss snuggling with the munchkin at night, though. But not as much as we miss sleep.

    And Susan, I don’t always succeed at getting the writing done (see next entry), but I’m trying. 🙂 Glad it’s entertaining…

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