Babies can hear you fighting even when they're asleep

Now I'm going to stress you out by telling you that recent research suggests babies can hear their parents' arguing even when they are asleep, and its probably not great for their emotional development. Yeah, I know, its not a nice thing for me to do on a Monday morning but I listened to this piece on NPR and I figured I'd spread the contagion of stress and anxiety around, in an attempt to alleviate my own.

In the study, researches performed brain scans on sleeping infants who were wearing headphones that played people speaking. All the words were nonsense, but they were spoken in a very angry tone, a moderately angry tone, a neutral tone and a happy tone: and the brain scan machine monitored what was going on in the sleeping infants' brains. So, researchers know that babies can perceive when you're fighting with your spouse over why he never soaks the pot after cooking when IT IS ONLY TAKES TWO SECONDS AND MAKES LIFE SO  MUCH SIMPLER! -- but what they don't know is exactly how it affects the babies later in life, probably because it depends on many variable factors. Duh.

So, I guess the take-away is, don't fight in front of your kids, or when they're asleep either. Don't fight at all, ever, even when they kids are off at a sleepover out of state because chances are, any day there'll be a new study reporting that even 50-100 miles away, after they fall asleep, your children retain the ability to hear you arguing and it will fuck them up irreparably. You can do that, right? Its not like the pressure of having to be totally perfect all the time will make you more likely to argue, is it? You ARE a Stepford wife, after all.

What can I say? This is what happens when I'm not allowed to raise my voice. I get reaalllly sarcastic.

Musical Beds

When I go to bed, there are two people in my bed: David and me.

When I wake up, it’s anyone’s guess who I’ll find there: definitely one child, potentially both. It’s sort of like the wild nights from many years ago, when you go out and drink too much and wake to a surprise in the morning. Except there’s nothing surprisingly

about my kids sneaking into my bed because it happens every night. I sleep right through the whole thing: they are stealthy and silent. And if they didn’t take over the whole freaking bed, I wouldn’t even mind particularly. To be fair, Seconda figured out early on that she should lie horizontally at the bottom of the bed at our feet, “that’s where I fit perfectly!” By which she means, it takes us all night to realize that she’s there. Primo, however, is HUGE and wildly energetic in his sleep, so we get treated to elbow jabs and swift kick to the ribs and head all night long. I wish I could figure out how to burn so many calories when I sleep: I could make my fortune selling that formula.

So, what ends up happening is, if Prino sneaks into our bed, we notice at some point during the night, when we wake to a throbbing pain in our side and find his massive foot there, and because it is way easier to move ourselves than to pick him up and move him without waking him, David or I will relocate to Primo’s bunk bed. Yes, it is ridiculous but we are tired and its just the easiest thing to do. Besides, I hate to confess it but I love having a whole bed to myself and the kids’ room, with the noise machine and room-darkening shades, is like a sleep spa. I love it.

The other night, however, something truly ridiculous happened.

The sort of thing that makes you say, Whoa, hold on a minute here, we need t oget our HOUSE IN ORDER.

David and I went to sleep in our martial bed, just the two of us, the way it should be.

In the middle of the night, I woke to a searing pain in my ass and found Primo’s arm flailing around wildly. David had beaten me to the punch, and already snuck into Primo’s bed, but since Primo was particularly feisty, I didn’t think I could manage even with just the two of us in the bed, so I relocated onto the couch.

As I lay there, trying to convince myself that there was nothing so very strange about sleeping on my couch while my son enjoyed the bed, I heard the door to the kids’ room open and heard the unmistakable pitter patter of tiny feet. Tiny four-year old feet.

I watched as Seconda snuck out of her bedroom into my bed, where Primo was already camped out. Being mostly asleep, she didn’t notice and happily laid herself at the foot of the bed, thinking her mother and father were happily sleeping beside her.

My thought at that moment was very clear: “Score! Now I get to sleep in the bunk beds!”

I silently stole into the kids’ bedroom and slipped into the top bunk, above my husband, on the bottom.

And that is how it happened that in the morning, my children woke up, sleeping in a queen bed and David and I woke, as bunkmates in the outer-space-themed bedroom.

Something’s gotta give. I have even considered just giving the kids our bed and taking their, enjoying the luxury of that isolation chamber every night, all long night. But I think what I’ll probably have to do is just build a palette on the floor next to our bed for the kids and tell them the early bird gets the worm and if the palette’s taken, then there’s no more room at the inn. But you know how it goes – I’ll probably build the palette and then end up sleeping there myself.

Sound the alarm! She's napping!

When my kids nap, I panic. And for good reason, I might add. My kids don't nap, they don't even go to sleep at night without a fight to the death. The last time Primo went to bed without a long, drawn-out ordeal, he had appendicitis. The fact that he fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow was, in fact, the deciding factor for us to cancel out trip to Iceland and bring him to the ER. The lower-left abdominal pain didn’t really convince me but the narcolepsy did. I knew something was seriously amiss.

Yesterday, we were tooling about in our apartment in the afternoon and while Primo read How to Train Your Dragon on the couch, and I checked my email, Sec grew suspiciously quiet. After a few minutes, I glanced over and saw her face down on the couch, arms dangling off the side like a drunk. I gasped. Then I strode over quickly and yelled, “SEC!”

She grumbled and turned her face to the other side. This was the real deal, not a Sleeping Beauty game. I dialed David.

“She’s asleep.”

“Who?”

“Your daughter.”

I commonly refer to the kids as belonging only to David when they are either terrifically bad, terrifically good or entering some kind of distress.

“Shit,” David groaned, “Wake her up, quick!”

Ever since our kids dropped their nap, in Sec’s case as the ripe old age of 2.5, our rule has been to ALWAYS let sleeping children lie, unless they are sleeping in the daytime in which case, NEVER let them lie. Wake them, immediately, and forcefully, or else we will pay for the brief afternoon reprieve dearly, so dearly, at nightfall. But, there is a caveat: should the children be sick, they are allowed to nap.

“I don’t know,” I said to David, “I think she might be sick.”

I’d touched her forehead and felt that not-quite-a-fever-but-a-bit-more-than-flushed temperature. She had no other symptoms but the nap was compelling enough to make me clear our schedule for last night. (Yes, David and I DO stuff sometimes, don’t act surprised that we have a life.)

Sure enough, an hour later, the kid was running a 101 fever, and that was based on those shitty temporal lobe thermometers which are about as accurate as reading a temperature as I am telling time by the position of the sun. Baby was burning up. I let her sleep over an hour before she got hot enough that I woke her for some Tylenol. And I’ve been watching Snow White on repeat play ever since. Later we’ll talk about the fascinating shit I discovered from repeat watching this 1930s gem. It’s a little like watching the movie high on shrooms: you start to see crazy shit embedded in it. That’s for another day.

Let me end this post with a public service announcement in the vein of all those terrifying commercials about vaccinating your kids against the whooping cough (which you should totally do, by the way, seriously, they are right, though awful):

"Sometimes your child’s afternoon nap isn’t just a sweet little snooze but a cause for panic and alarm. Be on guard. Treat the nap with the suspicion it deserves. Brought to you by A Mom Amok."

Morphine Dreams

Primo was only given one dose of morphine, the morning before his appendectomy. But it seemed to take a pretty long time to make its way out of his system. I am referring specifically to some totally nutty dreams the kid had, the first few nights after his surgery. On the first night, he was so doped up, I don’t think he dreamt at all, was just out like a light, when he wasn’t waking me to navigate the IV pole to the bathroom. But on the second night, when we were at home, things got wild.

I was so bone tired the day we got home from the hospital that I fell asleep at 7pm, literally in the middle of reading Harry Potter to Primo. I just remember reading and then hearing David say, “What happened to Mommy? She was just reading a minute ago.” And then blissful, sublime quiet. But a few hours later, I heard Primo calling and I ran into his bedroom to find him moaning.

“Oh honey! Are you OK? Does it hurt?”

“Ooooooo nooooo, not the Spanish teacher! Not the Spanish teacher!” Primo moaned, writhing around.

“What are you talking about? Oh my God, do you have a fever? Are you hallucinating?”

He didn’t seem to be hot at all. Just wild-eyed.

“Oooooo, ooooooohhhhh. Now I can’t play quidditch! Quidditch is exercise!”

Reality met fantasy. Primo was Harry Potter and Harry Potter had just had his appendix out. You’re not supposed to do exercise after you have your appendix out. So, no quidditch.

“Are you sleeping? PRIMO! You’re sleeping! You are not Harry Potter!”

“Ohhh. Ooooooh. What is a mumble mumble?”

“What? What is a what?”

“What is a mumble mumble?”

“I can’t hear you. What is a WHAT?”

“Oooooohhhhh. Ooooh nooooo. What is a RAVENCLAW???”

Since I was just about as high as he was, except just from exhaustion, I wasn’t much help. I actually tried to answer his question.

“A raven is a black bird and his claw is his talon. I am Nicole Kear and you are my son. You are not Harry Potter. I repeat you are not Harry Potter.”

Next time the kid gets morphine, I am demanding some as well. It really is only fair.

Overheard at bedtime

Last night I overheard the following exchange in my children's bedroom:

Sec: “AHHHHH! I just stepped on something! I hate this! I hate this whole world! I hate my bed! My foot hurts! Primo, can you heal it?"

Primo: "Let me see . . well, your body is pumping blood into your skin, to form a scab, which is a band-aid your body makes. Maybe it will have princesses on it."

“My scab will have princesses on it?”

“I am only joking about the princesses.”

“Hey, let’s pretend I am Sleeping Beauty and I touch the spindle and when I do you make a big noise and then I DIE!”

“No, no, lets do the original one when you dance so fast you melt!”

“NO NO NO! What do you think this is – Snow WHITE? I am SLEEPING BEAUTY and I touch the spindle and THEN I DIE!”

“Whatever you want.”

I have three thoughts:

A. You wouldn't have stepped on anything if you were lying down, like you're supposed to.

B. What a wise man my son is becoming to learn so early the power of "whatever you say."

C. Sorry, I was under the impression that this was BEDTIME, which entailed soothing activities like counting sheep, not changing into dress-up and launching elaborate and thrilling pretend play scenarios. My mistake.