Perchacnce to dream

Recently, James has been resisting falling asleep while nursing. He pulls off, clearly full, but is also clearly distraught with tiredness and tosses himself around, whining and shrieking. I usually wrap him up, pop a pacifier in his mouth and hold him until he falls asleep.

But it would take an utter fool not to recognize the flashing neon signs of a baby ready to be put on the path of putting himself to sleep, so tonight when he started doing his tired baby pterodactyl routine, I wrapped him up, popped his pacifier in and put him down in his bouncy seat. And he lay there calmly for a long time, going from looking curiously around the room, to a thousand-yard stare, to drooping eyes, to... completely asleep? Great Caesar's ghost, who is this child? If I hadn't been in the delivery room, I would never believe any baby who sleeps like he does could be a child of mine. As it is, I occasionally wonder if he's a changeling sent by the fairies to confuse me.

My children don't sleep. Katherine could only fall asleep when left completely alone and after fussing for ten minutes, when she would actually deign to sleep. She went through long hideous, mind-rending periods where she would be awake for never less than two hours in the middle of the night. Alec slept wonderfully as long as he was always in contact with another human body, at least until he would cheerfully rise to greet the rosy-fingered dawn at the bracing hour of 5:30. So James, who has regularly been sleeping an astonishing 6-8 hours without waking every night after falling asleep without the slightest fuss, is entirely foreign to our experience with babies. Kind of like discovering an exotic, yet very easy to tend South American orchid in your marigold bed.

Not that I'm complaining. No, no, no, no, not at all. In fact, I'm crossing every appendage I have and knocking on an entire forest to make sure that merely talking about this in public won't cause him to suddenly start waking every 45 minutes all night long, like a proper child of mine.