Shadows of the Night

My daughter gets very fussy at night. She is exhausted and rubs her eyes and cries but she just won’t go to sleep. She fights it like a heavyweight champion. Of all the things she got from me, this was the one thing I didn’t want her to copy. But oh well. 

We try to rock her to sleep and sing lullabies and every other thing in our arsenal of baby tricks. Sometimes they work but most of the time, they don’t. One thing that she seems to like but that isn’t always successful in getting her to nod off is the mobile.

It lights up and has some plush animals that hang down from it – a flamingo, a hippo and a frog. It also plays classical music. This same classical music puts me and my husband to bed almost instantaneously. It is not that effective with my little cookie. I know the music so well that I find myself humming it when I do other things around the house. 

We keep the bedroom very dark at night so the only light you see is the one from the mobile. In the early days when she was just learning about her body, we could see her looking at the shadow of her hand in the light from the mobile. Now we watch as she kicks the animals. She has shown a proclivity towards punching the hippo and smacking the flamingo as they go by. I am not sure what to expect when we go to the zoo for the first time. 

The title of this blog comes from a song by Pat Benatar. The video was about a female fighter pilot during WWII as they make a night bombing. I thought it fitting for this entry because there are times when I feel so tired after trying to get her to sleep that I crash like a bomb into bed. But it also works because she loves to watch the shadows of her limbs in the light from the mobile against the wall. I hope in the months to come she will embrace sleep and not try to keep it so far away.