GlennLog

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February 9, 2008

A Susurration of Crows

I was walking back with Rex from our local library, just three blocks away, rebuilt and then reopened last year, and heard a sound I didn't recognize. It was a fluttery sound, and I looked at the trees and saw no wind. Thousands of crows were wheeling overhead; the Arboretum and our neighborhood has an extremely large crow population and they like to gather right around dusk many nights of the week in fall and into winter.

I heard a susurration of crows, their thousands of wings beating against the air, hundreds of feet up, but with no cars passing, no one talking, just Rex and I, it was a little pretty swishing sound, non-repeating.

Beats a murder of crows.

Tonight was, remarkably, the first time Rex has been put to bed in his short life without being nursed before his bath. Lynn has had too little time with Ben lately, and the two of them went off to the Central Library and then the exciting downtown Red Robin on the pier (decorated with planes in its interior, for some reason). They were out late, and had a marvelous time, coming back laughing like old friends.

Rex is much more of a daddy's boy at this age than Ben was; Ben had much more separation anxiety from Lynn, where Rex accepts us both with remarkable equality, and, once recently, reached out for me (!) when I tried to hand him to Lynn. Which is fine, because it makes sharing the workload much easier. I'm sure we'll get bouts of mommy-only behavior, too, but it's very nice now.

We had some nap strikes in the last few days on Rex's part, which is rough because he needs them. We looked up what scienticians tell us is appropriate baby sleep, and Rex is very much on target. So a series of 5- to 25-minute naps or no nap was really a problem. Over the last two days, we've tried letting him complain more to see if he'd get to sleep or go back to sleep--something that utterly failed earlier in his life when he had the occasional bad nap--and, remarkably, it worked three times in a row. He was down from 11.50 am to 2.30 pm today, awake after 25 minutes nearly to the second, complaining (talking, a little wailing, but not beside himself) for about 20 minutes, before going back to sleep for about 1 2/3 hours.

It changes all the time: both boys move forward and backward as they mature, and we're never quite sure what works next. We try to be consistent, but we're imperfect, and the boys do sometimes seize their adventure when they sense an opening. That's their job. Ours is to make sure they sleep enough that they can enjoy their conscious time.

Posted by Glennf at February 9, 2008 10:13 PM

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Posted by: Dennis Noson at February 13, 2008 3:39 PM