baybeasts

Tis 4.40am and the little one has just finally fallen asleep after a session of bouncing and singing (PJ Harvey this time). He kept his bean awake from 2.30am. When I came out at 4am after my allotted 4 hrs sleep she was feeding him with a kind of demented look on her face. “I understand why people shake their babies” she said, and as she did, he gave her a smile of the most glorious, contented luminosity that we both immediately understood why we would never actually do it. She then handed him over to me whereupon he immediately started making the cutest faces and smiling wildly for at least 5 minutes, interspersed with tired frowns and grizzles.

I wonder if smiles starting at 4-6 weeks is an adaptive mechanism to counteract the other developmental trend of this period - increased hours of crying and unsettled behaviour…in other words, it’s much harder to send your unsettled baby to the glue factory when he looks into your eyes and smiles as if you are just the nicest thing he’s ever seen.

This is one tired baby. He doesn’t feed to sleep (we feel totally ripped off!), and he doesn’t yet know any other ways to get himself to sleep. So he needs us to actively settle him (involving upright movement) 24 hours a day which is fine in the daytime, but bloody hard at night time when all we want to do is lie down and close our eyes. Which, now that he is finally asleep against my chest, I am going to attempt to do.