the busy heart

On Saturday night, Henrietta slept through the night for the first time. No waking at 1:30 to cry it out. She just slept, and in the morning, when she woke up, I felt like she was my best friend and we had been reunited after a long and beautiful journey. If she were a little older, I would have begged to hear every detail of her dreams. I was so in love with her. I set her in her highchair with a scattering of Cheerios so I could make my breakfast, and took pictures of her. Her sleep-through-the-night photo shoot. And it was probably just my extra sleep, but at church that day, I somehow knew so much better how to deal with her. She sat on my lap through the first meeting, and I kept a steady stream of toys coming. One at a time: a block, a car, a little ball, another block, a zebra. A container of cereal puffs which I let her reach in to get for herself. She lounged on my lap, her bare feet rising now and then, and the flutter of the flower on her headband was movingly beautif...

My favorite picture. Possibly ever. There are two things you should know before I tell you this story: the first is that I'm a lousy sleeper. I'm one of the lousiest, and I wear earplugs, these ones, or I would never sleep at all. This allows me to hear the baby when she's actually making significant noise from the other room, and not just fluttering her eyelashes, which I swear I'd hear. And the other thing you should know is that our bed is broken in a sort of complicated way, so I can only sleep with my head where my feet should be or I dream that I'm sleeping on a mountainside all night long--really, that happened. But lately I haven't been sleeping much anyway. Not with earplugs, not with my head where my feet should be or anywhere else. Henrietta has been breaking records in the wake-up-at-night department. Gosh, it's been awful. She's teething, surely, but it's gotten worse and worse, and a few nights this last week she woke up 10-15...