The Long Awaited Day

During every terrible period of sleep with a baby--or rather, lack of sleep--there is always the hope that maybe this will be the night the baby sleeps. You never really know when it will happen, you see. You become accustomed to going to bed anticipating being awake every two hours during the night, and getting up in the morning requiring you to literally pry your eyelids open with your fingers.

Or rather, I get accustomed to that. Resigned, even.

But I also know--this not being my first, second, or even third child--that there will come one miraculous night when I will wake up several hours after going to sleep, totally disoriented because it has not been only two hours since the last time I had to haul my desperately exhausted body out of bed to care for a baby. You just never know when that night may come.

But that night does always come. For Poppy and her itchy, fussy, eczema-caused loooong stretch of bad sleep (about three months long, God help me), it came last night. I went to bed at 9:30 after nursing her and didn't wake up until 3 a.m.

It took me a minute to realize that yes, it really was 3 a.m., and no, I really had not been up in the previous 5.5 hours. I fed her and she fell back asleep again until 6 a.m.

There is nothing that compares to the relief of getting at least almost a full night of sleep after months of bad nights.

I'm assuming that the fact that her skin is almost normal is the reason for this. I don't know exactly what to credit for the vast improvement in her eczema. Three things happened at once that could be it: I came to the end of my three weeks of avoiding the commonly allergenic foods; I started using a new kind of emollient recommended by a Canadian doctor friend of A.'s; and I got some prescription-strength cortisone cream from our pediatrician. It could be any one of those things, or any combination of them.

It doesn't really matter, though. What matters is that Poppy is happier and sleeping better*. And so am I. Alleluia.

(I would post a photo of the happier and significantly less red baby here, except I seem to have lost my cell phone and thus, my only camera. Swell.)

* Though I should really shut up about it, because it was only one night and I have probably jinxed myself now.