Sleep

I crave sleep like an alcoholic craves booze.
I'll take it anywhere, anytime. Standing up. Sitting down. In the shower with water streaming down my face.
I came to last night around 7:30 p.m. under Elizabeth's pink coverlet. She was patting both my cheeks with her chubby hands.
"Mom! Mom!" she whispered, "Wake up! Wake up! You stopped singing!"
Apparently, I had been lying comatose for some time, having ceased my alphabet lullaby somewhere around "L-M-N-O."
Frankly, I'm surprised I made it past the letter "D."
To my chagrin, staying up all night with my eight-week-old baby is making my tired.
This is hard for me to admit because I was all huff and bluster prior to giving birth.
"Oh, how bad can it be," I yodeled to my girlfriends, "I had twins the first time around!"
It's true that with the twins I averaged about three hours of sleep per night for about six months. It was miserable. It was insane. It was, in fact, the paramount reason we waited five years to even consider having another child.
But with "only" one baby--a singelton in the nomenclature in the world of mothers of multiples--I figured it would be better.
And it is.
I'm getting four and a half hours of sleep each night.
While the pediatrician promises me Charlotte's nights will get longer, I know from past experience there's no real promise in that.
After all, I was just last year asking Elizabeth's preschool teacher how to get her to stop the night wakings.
"Once you have children, you'll never sleep well again."
That gem came from my godmother who, I clearly recall, was once so exhausted in the early 1980s that she spread out her mink coat on my grandmother's living room floor and commenced to snore her way through an otherwise roaring Christmas party.
"Oh," she said sometime around midnight, "I just needed a little nap."
Well, I need a little nap, too.
I don't even need the mink: Just let me lie down on the brick kitchen floor and drape a napkin over me and I'll be thankful.
Oh, no.
It that crying I hear?
I may not be able to sleep but at least I can dream, right?