DH and I gave up. After 2 weeks of sleeping in the living room, a failed attempt to share again our bedroom with L (which basically means L taking two thirds of our bed, DH the other third and me being squeezed between the two) we decided to put L in his brother’s and sister’s room. The rationale was simple: no one in the whole freaking apartment has been sleeping properly in the last week so why not put the kids together? It cannot be worse, can it?
DH and Benjamin thus assembled L’s crib and that’s when it hit me. Our three babies were going to be piled up in their tiny room (welcome to Manhattan). Some mums would probably sacrifice their sanctuary and take one of the cribs in their room…But I was not one of them. I assuaged my guilt by putting wall decals on the kids room’s wall and said sheepishly ‘it will look less like an orphanage I suppose’. When the room was child free it actually looked almost eerily peaceful.
Then we put the 3 sleepy monsters down. L started to whine but we remained strong and left them to sort it out… One hour later they were all sleeping with L surrounded by his siblings’ soft toys (a total of 4). I assumed that :
1- they tried to soothe their little brother, in which case it is cute OR
2- they tried to suffocate him, in which case I should probably start worrying about what they can do to him with their play necklaces…
DH and I had an ‘aww’ moment looking at them, I think we even hugged in bliss. What a couple of idiots…because at midnight all hell broke loose. When I got into the kids’ bedroom, L was crawling, frenetically screaming in his crib while G & P, clearly freaked out by so much noise, were taking turns to stand up in their bed and scream ‘Maman’. Their timing was,by the way, bemusing. It felt like there was a puppet master pulling the strings of this horrific show.
As I sat on the floor facing my kids I could not help but think this was a scene from a bad B movie titled ‘The Exorcist meets Trainspotting’. The pediatrician’s recommendation to move L into the bathroom seemed at that moment very, very, very appealing ..
redlipstickmama 