Sleep like a baby

Oh, Sleep -- you crazy, feels like heaven, sweet oblivion, daily necessity, uncontrollable state, you. Sleep, I will love you always, but we're on a 'break' right now, trying to sort out our differences. I want more of a commitment from you, but you have concerns about my fidelity, my unpredictable fits of leaving you for the computer, the bathroom, Munchkin, or a guilty interlude with my own conscious mind. I know you're probably going to break my heart, or make me crazy, Sleep--I've seen what you've done to The New Girl and Bubandpie--but you feel so good, I can't give you up. I stray, but I always come back, even if you don't want to take me.

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I want to sleep like a baby.

Last week, crushed under a pile of grading I couldn't seem to find the time to get out from under, I finagled a free pass from Munchkin's bedtime and headed out to Starbucks, exams in tow. As I tied my shoes and hefted the big backpack on my shoulders, I asked Pynchon if, in addition to bathing, dressing, combing, bottling, and bedding our little girl, he could possibly remember to pull her laundry basket out of her room for me?

He forgot.

He only remembered as he creeped softly down our old and creaky stairs from her room, empty bottle in hand, toddler tucked in and kissed. He pondered his options as he stepped over and around the squeaky boards we taught ourselves to avoid by reflex. Laundry? Sleeping baby! Promise to wife? Sleeping baby! Sleeping baby! The situation was dire, though: it was possible Munchkin might have to go to daycare in pyjamas if laundry was neglected for yet another day.

With manly resolve, and tossing oaths to the wind, he marched back upstairs, fully prepared to wake Munchkin up and start the bedtime routine all over. He opened her (squeaky) bedroom door. He strode across her (squeaky) bedroom floor. He fumbled open the (not quite square) wardrobe door. He pulled out the laundry basket, and, not realizing that an empty one was nested under the full one, heard one clatter to the floor. He picked it up and put it back in the wardrobe. The door got away from him and banged shut. On the way out of Munchkin's room, he bumped the full basket on the change table.

All to the accompaniment of stone silence.

Munchkin had been put down awake, and in the time it took Pynchon to get to the bottom of the stairs, make a decision, and climb back up again, she feel so soundly asleep that his Keystone Cops laundry basket retrieval exercise failed to elicit from her so much as a soft sigh.

How far we've come! We spent months trying not to breathe when she (please dear god please) fell asleep. For awhile, we made sure we were both upstairs when she went to bed, because we didn't want to risk walking past her door. We shot angry glares at each other for such transgressions as sneezing-during-the-baby's-nap. Now, we are coming to grips with the new information that we can make a ruckus not three feet away from her and she will either sleep through it or ignore us roundly.

I want to sleep like a baby. And start conversing above a whisper after 7pm.