Sleep Train

For the past week or so, Joe has been going through what I will call a ‘Sleep Event’ in which he’s regressing, or maybe it’s we who are regressing, and we are sort of attempting to train him, or it is he is trying to train us. He’s sleeping less and waking up more, and so are we, and we are still trying to figure out what sort of parents we are, what sort of kid he is, and how to best approach it. And then there is the googling, and all of the methods, and all of the books, and all of the anecdotes about how this person let this kid cry from ten minutes and now he sleeps for 14 hours a night, and we wade through all of this information while partially asleep ourselves, unable to remember the page we read ten seconds ago. I think for now, I don’t need any more information. What I need is AN ACTUAL SLEEP TRAIN, which is something I awake-dreamt of in the middle of the night, while deciding whether we should feed Joe / give him his pacifier and ruin his life or ours (?) or give into to him so we can all go back to sleep. I saw a blue and soft train moving through tree and clouds, on a track made of Casper Mattress, seats made of lavender pillows, melatonin air. Sleep Train comes for Parents. It dings softly as it waits outside of your door. If you’re lucky, you hear it, and you crawl out of your window and into one of its cars. Sleep Train then pauses time, goes back, and does soft, slow laps around a vacation you took when you were 25, when you didn’t have a baby yet. You sleep soft and deep like you just ate half a snickerdoodle pizza then got in a hot tub then crawled into bed, you sleep for however long you need, and when you wake up, you’re back in your bed. Rested, you go to look at your baby, and suddenly your baby isn’t a thief anymore, he’s once again a GIFT.

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