Infants can’t do math.  Who knew.  I would have thought being born 3 1/2 months early would have given her a head start on all the other kids in the telling time department, but I guess not.

So the kid is sleeping from 9:30pm to about 6am.  Pretty good really.  For some reason I felt we could do better.

I know.  I know.

My big plan went a little something like this: If she’s eating at 8:30pm and sleeping from 9:30 to 5:30ish the next morning, it would seem by changing her diaper and feeding her at 11pm, right before I go to bed, ought to cause her to sleep till 7 or 8am.  It was a nugget of parenting genius.  It took me a few nights to get up the nerve to try it.  Every time I went into her room and saw her sawing lumber, the voice of former co-worker popped into my head; “Don’t believe all the crap you read about parenting these days.  Never wake a sleeping baby.”

You know what, she was right.  Disaster does not begin to describe what took place at 11pm Wednesday night when I finally decided to test my little sleep/wake time continuum theory.  Yeah, that’s what I’m calling it now.  If it was successful, I would have called it something else.

It started off so well.  I go in, scoop her out of the crib for a quick, pit crew like diaper change.  Then off to the Chair of Nourishment for what will hopefully be 4 to 6 ounces of liquid sleep.  Cruising along through ounce #3 and I hear and then feel a rumble from down under.  She whacked her diaper pretty hard.  She’s not drinking anymore till it’s changed so it’s back to the pit for a change.  Smiling and a little laughing.  Not good. She’s too awake and engaged.  Hoping the formula will help her hit the snooze button.

New butt sack and it’s back to the Chair of Nourishment.  A few minutes in and her face goes a little red.  Then my leg gets a little warm.  I’m thinking it can’t be.  Then she grunts and I can hear the fireworks going off.  Diaper #3 in the last 10 minutes.  She’s wide awake now.  This is starting to spiral out of control.  Her legs are moving like she’s standing on hot coals.  And there goes her foot into the dirty diaper that I didn’t move far enough away whilst I applied the new one.  It hits the deck.  Thankfully it fell business side up, so Herb, no clean up on aisle 7.  I say again no clean up on aisle 7.

There is, however, clean up on foot #1.  It now is more like a runaway fire hose at full pressure.  I can’t catch it and it’s contaminated.  This could escalate to a level 5 haz-mat event if I can’t corral it.  Since this is not my first rodeo, I manage to get the situation under control.  Now I have to re-affix her heart monitor leads as they came loose in the mini wrestle-mania undercard bout we just had.

Got all that done, it’s midnight but the plan can still be saved.  That is until the heart rate monitor wires knock the plastic box of wipes off the changing table and they explode on the floor in a way that causes every last one to fly out of the box.  There are wipes everywhere.  The only thing covering the ground more than the Pampers Wet Wipes, non-scented type, are the vulgarities falling out of my mouth.  This kid’s first words could be surprising.  Well, it’ll be surprising to everyone else.  I’ll feign the look of surprise, but the first time she speaks and calls someone or something a filthy so and so, color me un-fazed.

Anyway I got the wipes spill under control and it was back to the bottle.  She was not really interested at this point.  But she was wide awake.  After about ten minutes she wanted to eat again.  She let me know this by splitting my ear drum with a scream that would make Helen Keller look.  By this time her reflux had revved up so she could only take about two or three swallows at a time.  Took about 20 minutes for her to get enough of the bottle.

This is what should have happened.

Still wide awake though.   New diaper, food , and going to bed later should equal sleeping the same 8 hours, just at a later time.  In other words now she should sleep from 11pm to at least 7am.  How is she not understanding this?  It’s simple math.

Now she’s not sleeping at all.  She wants to laugh at me.  The plan has fallen apart.  It’s survival time.  Got to get her to bed.  It’s approaching 1:30 in the am.  Need to get her to sleep.  She’s not having it.  After 30 plus minutes of rocking she nods off, but only lightly.  Too bad – she’s going in, nothing I can do to stop that now.  I put her in the crib and leave without looking back.  It’s 2:15.  Surprisingly she is quiet when I finally crawl into bed.  After ten minutes she finds her voice again.  Tracy, a saint among saints, mercifully gets up to deal with AM.  Tracy had been chuckling since I came back into the room.  She heard my tapestry of profanity and got tickled.

This is what actually happened.

Tracy is back in bed by 2:45 and the kid is sound asleep.  Turns out the kid wanted more bottle.  Oh well.  Tracy says at least she should sleep late.  No way.  She’s getting up at 5am just to stick it in my shorts.  I can tell.

5:15 and Im back in the room feeding the kid.  At 5:30 Frank, the other kid, decides it’s time to get up.  This plan could not have gone to hell any more than if it took a limo.

No idea what I was thinking.

Never wake a sleeping child – they can’t do math.