While our friend Becky was going through seven shades of agony giving birth to her and Paul’s lovely daughter on Saturday night, there was an entirely different drama going on in the Hughes household.
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Amy had spent the previous night sleeping at her Grandmas in preparation for her abandonment when we go off to Chicago. Apparently she slept very well while she was there, but whatever they had doped her up with had worn off by the time she got home.
To be fair she did try her hardest stay in her room after bedtime. But every quarter of an hour or so we heard the padding of her feet on the stairs and she emerged bright and breezy into the lounge. “I’m just getting my magazine” she’d tell us, or “I want to watch grown up TV”, or “I want to give Evan a cuddle”. The host of excuses and reasons seemed infinite, and became more and more outlandish as time wore on (“I want you to make me a rocket ship”).
“You need to go to sleep sweetheart” I told her on one of the many escorts back to her room.
“I know Daddy,” she told me “but it’s very difficult tonight isn’t it”.
It was hard to be cross with her. She was so cheerful in her wakefulness that to be angry would be unfair. It was blatantly obvious that she just wasn’t tired and, short of locking her in her room, I couldn’t think of a way of enforcing a conventional bedtime. In the end at around 10:30 I let her clamber our into bed with me while Kerry grabbed some TV time downstairs. Amy had just started to finally nod off when the phone rang.
On the days both Amy and Evan were born my Dad took a landscape photograph to record the day. Amy’s is particularly nice as it is of a rather spectacular sunset. We really value these pictures and thought it would be cool if we did the same for Paul and Becky. However, due to one thing or another we hadn’t got our act together and got outside before it was dark, so we’d just about given the idea up as a dead loss. Kerry had told her Mum about this, and so when she saw on the 10:30 news that there was going to be a lunar eclipse she very thoughtfully gave us a ring to let us know.
We sprung into action, not so much like a well oiled machine but like a rusty and decrepit clown car. The next hour or so consisted of Kerry and I rushing around the house pulling tripods and zoom lenses out of long forgotten corners and trying to work out how to take a decent picture without it going all blury. This flurry of activity banished all thoughts of sleep from Amy’s mind and she took great delight rushing around with us, waving a torch around and demanding to go outside in her pajamas (“But I have my wellies and my umbrella on Daddy!”).
On top of all this Evan woke and began to complain bitterly that he wanted feeding. For a period of around 15 minutes the house was a pure dictionary definition of complete chaos. But it all worked out in the end. Kerry got a great shot of the moon, Amy got to go out on a “night-time adventure walk”, and Evan got the bottle of milk that he wanted.
And me? When the dust had finally settled I got to drive a hyperactive three year old around the Yorkshire moors for an hour in a desperate attempt to get her to fall asleep. Still, it seems only fitting that we marked the Layla’s arrival with a night of chaos and disturbed sleep. Paul and Becky have all this to look forward to. You lucky people you.
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Ooooohh, my goodness. You both have my most sincere sympathy.
We’ve never had to resort to the midnight driving around thing, but Greg did once take Allie for a walk in her stroller at 10:30 p.m. or so. She just wouldn’t go to sleep and he said every time he looked down at her he could see her little eyes going, blink blink.
Awesome photo!
English is funny. I know that a torch is a flashlight, but I had an image of Amy running around with a pitchfork and a flaming torch on her midnight adventure!
Sometimes – only sometimes, mind – a very late evening with dudelet snuggled between us on the sofa watching the most anodyne grown-up TV we can find is the most wonderful thing in the world. But not every night. Only time we’ve taken dudelet to the US was when he was four months old. So his sleeping was kind of all over the shop anyway.
Dwayne – in England, they get their first pitchforks at age 2 and by 5, we expect to see them burning down castles. They’re not allowed to burn witches, though – just politicians.