Sleep Medley …

I may be tempting fate here, I do realise that, but I can’t resist the temptation to celebrate what is currently one of Olivia’s most endearing qualities – her dedication to the art of sleeping soundly at all hours. Indeed, were it not for the quiet dedication with which she is approaching that task, I would not be able to update this blog with the regularity that I have thus far managed. She sleeps, I noodle away on the Internet. Long may it continue.


She is waking more, we have noticed that over the past 48 hours or so – particularly after the 10pm feed which, for reasons known only to her, she takes to be the cue for a couple of hours energetic wriggling, burping and squawking, whilst Mummy and Daddy eye the clock with rising desperation as the precious hours of potential nightime sleep ebb away.

But in general (and this makes the 10pm extravaganza all the more galling) Olivia is happy to devote hours of her day to examining the back of her eyelids. Right now, she is having a bit of a wriggle and using her arms (what fun new toys are these!?!?!) to conduct the “Mozart for Babies” CD I am playing her. But soon she will again slumber, will again return to the Land of Nod, in which she spends so much of her days. Indeed, sometimes her determination to reside there is so acute that we can't even wake her for scheduled feeds (for the 10pm feed, she will sleep through all prompting, then immediately wake up and wail when we put her to bed and sneak off for some sleep of our own ...).

The ability to lie around all day shadow-conducting Mozart, blowing bubbles and waiting for the milk bar to open again is just another reason why it is such a true inequity of life that we grow up to lose any form of substantive memory of this period of our existence…