I Like the Nightlife

She still seems a little suspicious.

If you notice our family looking bleary-eyed, it's because Jubilee is having "night issues." Again. I'll be curious to find out if she is a "night person" when she grows up. I can't tell if she hates nighttime, or if she loves it, and wants to bathe in the moonlight instead of sleeping it away.

Her night issues have manifested in various ways. There have been phases where she just wakes up and crawls over to Jon, begging him to get up and play with her. When she was a newborn, it took hours of coaxing and heavy machinery to get her to fall asleep initially at bedtime. Now, she'll fall asleep with relative ease, but wakes up fussing during the night, which can rapidly escalate into full-fledge screaming.

Friday night, for example. I hear her fussing, and offer her the num-num, which, under normal circumstances, lulls her back into sleepy dreamland without further ado. Didn't work. Jon picks her up, hoping she'll "assume the position," which is what we call it when she melts into him and falls almost instantly comatose. Nope. She doesn't want to be held, doesn't want to be put down. Well, let me clarify. When she's being held, she wants to be put down. When she's put down, she's miserable until she's held again. "Turn on the light!" I whisper-yell to Jon. Sometimes just changing the environment can head off a tantrum. Jubilee starts slapping at the air in the direction of our cow-shaped humidifier. We hold her close to it- maybe she wants to play with the dial? She smacks it with both hands, now, as though the smiling bovine is the root of all unhappiness. We turn it off, she shrieks louder. We turn it back on, she throws herself to the floor in anguish. I take her back to the bed, and she sits up, staring at the green power light, gulping for air between sobs. "Turn the cow around so it's facing the wall!" I whisper-scream to Jon, who generally needs direction during middle-of-the-night crises. Finally, Jubilee started to settle down, nursing herself back from the ledge.

In the aftermath, Jon came back from the bathroom, looked around, drank water, and sat on the bed. "How did this even start?" he asked. "Were the lights out? Were we sleeping?" I still laugh, thinking about all the possible answers that I could have offered. (No, Jon, we pinched Jubilee because we were tired of letting her sleep in peace. We paired electromagnetic shock treatments with making her look at the humidifier cow.) But instead, I opted for a gently sarcastic, "Yes, Jon, what else would have been going on?" Then, I couldn't help it, I started giggling at the absurdity of his question. Which made Jubi fuss, still in light sleep. So we quietly calmed down, and slept until morning.