The Cusp, The Cat and Giving Paul Potts A Seater.

Somehow… due to what can only be down to some sort of freak genetic mutation, my child doesn’t like sleep.

If I was really tired and someone gave me a nice bath, then a nice massage, wrapped me up in a fluffy sleeping bag and then practically begged me to sleep for as long as I possibly could; that would be one of the best days of my life. Yet trying to get The Baby to sleep is like trying to cycle up Gas Hill with flat tyres, whilst giving Paul Potts a seater.

Paul

When I was pregnant, The Man and I would enthusiastically chat about how relaxed we were going to be with our baby, because we didn’t want one of those babies who needed dark and quiet to sleep during the day. Our baby was going to be one of those ones that can sleep anywhere, anytime through anything. Oh the naivety.

Then I gave birth to the baby equivalent of a roulette table. If your baby never naps or sleeps, you can accept this and plan around it. If your baby always naps or sleeps, you can accept this and plan around it. I have no idea what will happen from one day to the next. This drives me insane. I like planning. A lot.

In particular, daytime naps are a real treat. You know you see babies who just beautifully drop off on their mother’s shoulder? Or those babies who are really sweetly asleep in their pram whilst their mum enjoys a leisurely stroll around the park? Not my baby. No. Even when she is displaying all the signs of tiredness… still no. But surely if she’s tired, she’ll just fall asleep right? HA! NO! Unless I facilitate a nap, The Baby will become a demon. Everything you do will be wrong. Pick her up? Wrong. Lay her down? Wrong. Place in the baby walker? Wrong. Attempt to put on a cardigan or coat? LIFE MIGHT AS WELL BE OVER.

My baby requires a very, VERY specific set of conditions before she will even entertain the prospect of a daytime nap. These are as follows:

• ·      In the pram, at or above a consistent, certain pram speed, over rough terrain. No smooth shop floors. No stopping. Pram pusher must walk, adhering to these conditions for approximately 20 minutes BEFORE nap will commence. Success rating: 85%
• ·      In the sling whilst the sling wearer is performing the bob-and-sway technique. The sling wearer must not sit during this time. The sling wearer must not talk during this time. Success rating: 90%
• ·      In the car. Travelling consistently at or above 60mph. Success Rating: 97%
• ·      In the cot, following a minimum 5 minute lay on the bed, leg rub, in dim lighting (the owl night light with a muslin draped over it), lullaby on the iPad, wearing 1.5 tog sleeping bag. Success rating: 4%

I know what you’re thinking… The Baby clearly DOES nap, so just use the pram, sling or car techniques all the time. Well this is EXHAUSTING. Genuinely. Particularly when The Baby can require 4 or 5 naps per day. It is also expensive in terms of petrol. Plus, there are only so many times you can drive up and down the A47 or A11 before you want to drive OFF the A47 or A11. So I work REALLY hard on the cot idea so that there is a CHANCE I can have 30 sacred minutes to do things like eat some lunch, do a wee, clear a pathway through the baby paraphernalia to the couch or, you know, breathe for a minute.

So following the setup of the above cot conditions, we then enter an intense negotiation period (similar, I imagine, to those which occur in the White House at a time of national unrest). Then, all being well, we reach what I call The Cusp.

I cannot emphasise the importance of The Cusp. It is a pivotal period that sometimes will solely determine how the rest of my day will turn out. It only lasts between 30 seconds – 2 minutes, but it is of upmost importance. Sometimes I have quite literally felt as though the future of my own life depends upon The Cusp.

The Cusp is the collection of moments whereby The Baby is not quite awake… but not quite asleep. The eyes are ½ to ¾ closed. All is still. Breathing has slowed. Sleep is close. So. Very. Close. But The Cusp has to be a collection of moments that are perfectly still. No new noises. No new movements. The introduction of either of these could set you right back to negotiation stage. For the sake of your own sanity, THIS CANNOT HAPPEN. You could have spent 50 minutes getting to The Cusp. You cannot go back now. You must get to the sleep. Then, if sleep arrives, you can ever so gently back away like a stealthy CIA operative on a life-saving mission and maybe.. just maybe.. sit down for 5 minutes.   

If you know me, you will know that things happen to me that you literally couldn’t make up. Ridiculous things that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Mr Bean movie. But I genuinely believe that life has saved up the best of these moments for now. For The Cusp.

Genuine things that have happened during the few vital seconds of The Cusp:

• ·      2 x Harley Davidsons (not just motorbikes, HARLEY DAVIDSONS) have confused my residential street for Brands Hatch.
• ·      Early Tesco Delivery. If you have Tesco Deliveries, you will understand how rare this is. Unless of course, you are in the midst of a Cusp.
• ·      Marge. My cat. I swear to GOD she has a CuspDar. She just KNOWS. She does it every, single, time. She can be outside and across the street when the nap commences. Yet she will come through the cat flap and up the stairs JUST at the time of The Cusp. And I SWEAR she has a true and meaningful desire to fuck things up. She has jumped across The Baby, on The Baby, she has knocked over every moveable object in the room, she has drunk water from the baby bath more loudly than a hippo belly flopping off a diving board into a swimming pool. Always. During. The Cusp. So successful is she at screwing up naps, that we have now renamed her The Nap Destroyer. So Marge cannot be in the room. However if you are stuck in the middle of a Cusp and you hear her coming, it adds a new dimension to the difficulty rating. It requires a two-man team to hold back Marge. We very frequently have a hall landing stand-off. It is a good job that I have a history of playing netball, because the Marge Prevention Strategy requires skill. Please follow this link to observe a video representation of what occurs in my hallway between myself and Marge at least 2 times per day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qddNUznTxlI

The Nap Destroyer

• ·      Bone cracking. That’s right. My elbow and hip have cracked during The Cusp. Both have ruined The Cusp.
• ·      Leaf blowing, Gutter washing or Strimming. (Norse genuinely appear to have a contract to clean the shit out of our road as noisily as possible at the specific times I am trying to get my baby to sleep.)
• ·      All the traffic from the M25 has been redirected down my road. (Actually it’s probably just the school run mums… but sounds like the former)
• ·      Full tree removal. Workmen have come to remove an ENTIRE TREE from outside my house during The Cusp. TWICE.
• ·      A boy/man wearing nothing but Calvin Klein boxers has commenced paint stripping on next doors roof, which coincidentally is right outside the bedroom window.
• ·      A primary school trip of approximately 150 children has chosen to conduct what I can only assume is an experiment to see how noisily they can walk down a street.
• ·      A taxi beeped it’s horn. This was particularly painful, as the first beep did not ruin The Cusp. The FIVE consecutive beeps did. 
• ·      Floorboards have given up the will to hold up my body weight and made a horrific cracking sound in places that have previously been strong enough to hold up a giant wardrobe.
• ·      I have punched the sofa out of pure frustration (but also safety, because it is squishy), yet accidentally caught the edge of the remote control (the Apple remote control which, by the way, is the smallest remote control invented) and injured my knuckle so badly that we now believe it was fractured.
• ·      A mutant fly the size of a small rodent, with a flying sound rivaling an AK47 has flown through a door at the very back of our house, down the hall, up the stairs, round 2x corners and performed a descending loop before landing on the cot. During The Cusp. Ruining The Cusp.
• ·      The Man decided to take a door off it’s hinges and plane it. This was the day he nearly regained his status as a single man.

The next day however, I will do exactly the same thing because The Baby is displaying exactly the same level of tiredness and The Baby will go to sleep straight away and sleep for 2 hours.  There is literally NO PATTERN to how The Baby functions. And don’t think I make that statement lightly. I have researched, hypothesized, tested and re-tested almost every reasonable method available. We’ve routined, we’ve non-routined, we’ve ‘gone with the flow’, we’ve gadget-ed, we’ve skin to skinned. I even constructed a colour coded spreadsheet to try and detect any pattern. That’s right, a spreadsheet. No pattern detected.

Sigh.

Thank god for cake.