Kevin just brought the…

Kevin just brought the baby to me, at around 4:30 a.m. Normally, he'd put her to sleep around 3-ish, and she'd sleep until 5:30 or so, at which point I'd take over, feeding her some of the previous night's leftover pumped milk. But not tonight. Apparently, she'd been eating like a fiend, having already consumed almost twenty ounces, instead of her usual sixteen-ish. So Kavi wasn't hungry. But she was fretting like nuts, whimpering and whining (clearly preparatory to full-throated howling), and flailing her arms and legs like crazy. Poor Kev was clearly frayed, having spent quite a while trying to get her to settle down, and had brought her to mommy in the hopes that snuggling up with mommy would magically fix things. Snuggling with mommy did not magically fix things.

But what did, in the end work, was mommy swaddling her (which Kevin has trouble with, not sure why -- Kavi almost always kicks her way immediately out of his swaddles, and y'know, he's a topologist, so he really out to be getting all the folding right... :-) and then holding her close while rocking and singing. Two songs and she was lightly asleep (we went with Trout Fishing's "Lullaby" and then "House at Pooh Corner"), one more song and she was safely in her moses basket ("Puff the Magic Dragon"), and when she started to fuss a few minutes later, rocking the basket and a fourth song ("By My Side", from Godspell) seemed to do the trick. We hope. Fingers crossed.

I *think* she was just overtired; she'd somehow not managed to fall asleep when she should have, and after that, was too wound up to fall asleep. It happens to me all the time, and usually resting my head on Kevin's chest and watching old sitcoms knocks me out. But I think Kavya's a little young for "Friends" re-runs. We'll stick to songs for now...

Now I'm going to pump (since we're pretty much out of milk) and read journals, and we're back to what passes for a typical morning around here. Poor Kevin is passed out next to me; he says that as long as he has his earplugs in, the sound of the pump doesn't bother him. So I can stay in bed, and who knows -- after pumping, maybe I'll get to doze a little bit longer before the little critter wakes up and starts howling for real.