Requiem for Brain Cells

Shortly after noon I turned on the oven to heat lunch. About one I told my sister, "We should go eat--I'm sure the food is hot by now." I went into the kitchen, opened the oven, and remarked, "I'm sure the food would be hot by now if it had been in the oven instead of in the refrigerator." It worked just as well as she was then able to reach her goal of finishing the crib skirt before lunch. (The nursery looks quite charming thanks to her work. Now we just need a sunflowery quilted hanging on the wall over the crib.)

A little bit later I noticed Abbey was soaking through all cloth in the vicinity, and realized I had completely forgotten to change her at her last feeding--two hours earlier.

I tried taking a nap this afternoon to recharge my brain cells. I'm not sure how much it accomplished.

But I probably needed it. Because I am trying to resolve an anomaly in Abbey's schedule. She was quite happily functioning on a three-hour feeding cycle, with the ability to stretch longer during the night. Somehow this longer stretch at night always threw the schedule off enough that this longer stretch would only put us down to one feeding every other night, and on the alternate nights, she would wake up hungry at 3 a.m., giving me just enough time to feed her, get her back to sleep, and drift off to sleep myself before the alarm would go off at 4:30 and I'd have to get up to feed DOB and get him off to work. I found it very difficult to arise under these circumstances.

So my theory was that if I fed Abbey every night about 9 or 9:30, she would sleep until 1 or so, then I could feed her, and she'd sleep to 4:30 and all would be well. So tonight I woke her up at 9 and fed her. As custom for her last evening feeding dictated, I sang her a few songs and put her in bed. Her eyes were wide open. She cried. And kept crying. Intermittently for the next two and a half hours. She's not crying now because I'm feeding her. But what is up with her? Did someone bring her a latte?

And tomorrow, how do I stay awake enough to keep her awake to keep this from repeating?