"The sun is but a morning star." - Thoreau

My baby is three months old today.  Happy birthday, little guy!

His father and I were talking today on the way our lives were different now, and how things seem to be now as they have always been.  But I'm going to try not to go all Dooce on you.

Instead, I'm going to tell you about the baby monitor.

I hate the baby monitor.  It somehow manages to magnify every sound in a three block radius, while at the same time picking up in the background a country/western radio station which fades in and out like a message from the outside world in a B-quality monster movie.  Tonight I was in the kitchen baking cupcakes, and I could hear the baby's dad snoring in our bedroom (via the monitor) louder than I could hear anything going on with the baby himself.

This, I tell his father, is the reason why I bring the baby into our bedroom every night to finish his sleep in the co-sleeper next to my head.  But it isn't true.

In fact, the other night, the thing I dread most actually happened.  I was asleep in my bed with the monitor sputtering and hissing and twanging away next to my head, and to my room open and the door to the baby's room also open and right across the hall.  And the baby started to cry, as babies do.  And I didn't wake up.

His father had fallen asleep on the sofa waaayyy downstairs, and finally, after who-knows-how-long, the crying got loud enough and scared enough that it woke him up.  He came upstairs, fed the baby, changed him, comforted him.  And I didn't wake up until he woke me up by handing the baby to me.  You cannot imagine how bad I feel.  This is, in fact, the exact thing I had dreaded and the reason I have always resisted putting the baby to bed in his big crib in his own room.   And now, of course, not by my own planning, I have the very excuse I need to keep him in our room a bit longer - probably until he hits the 20lb limit on his co-sleeper, in fact.

But none of this is the real reason I want him sleeping next to me.

Here's the truth:  The baby wakes up at more or less 4:55 am on the dot every morning.  His father and I have to get up at 6am anyhow, so I bring the baby across into the bed with me and let him nurse for an hour or so while I sleep.  I never really thought I'd be able to fall asleep with someone sucking noisily and joyfully at my nipple, but such are the strange ways of motherhood, I've found.

So the alarm goes off at six, and dad goes off to get in the shower.  Usually around this time baby is asleep again, and I disengage from him, stretch my hip, and maybe give him a kiss or whisper in his ear.  And he wakes up.

And he looks in my face, the first thing he sees every morning.  And he smiles at me ... one moment his face is the model of post-sleep confusion - where am I?  What time is it?  Why am I awake?  ... and the next this expression of pure joy spreads across his face like beams of sunlight creeping into the room, and I am afirmed for the rest of the day.

In not to much longer, baby boy will be too big for his co-sleeper, and he'll sleep through the night, and I'll no longer have an excuse to keep his father from leaving him in his crib (all alone!) all night.  Morning will come, and he'll wake to the mobile and the froggy and the blue sky.  And I'm sure he'll smile at me when I come in to collect him to start his day.

But it won't be the same.