Between waking and sleeping: When baby larks grow up
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MummyBloggers
There is an ad on the radio at the moment that I find myself identifying with a lot, lately. In it, a small child comes bounding into his parents’ bedroom on a weekend morning, gleefully reminding them that this is the day they promised to take him to the park. Mum and Dad groan and tell him to go and watch cartoons while they sleep off their hangovers (They don’t actually tell him that’s what they are doing, but it’s pretty obvious when Mum admits that the night before was great fun but “sooo not worth it”). The child sighs and says, “Not again!”, before stomping off to soak up a couple of hours of Paw Patrol.
This ad is intended to encourage people to drink less, but that’s not the reason it’s starting to resonate with me more and more. I don’t lie in bed on a Saturday morning, fighting off the horrors left by a skinful of drink the night before, dreading the entreaties of my children to bring them out somewhere in the cruel sunlight. Like the mother in the ad, I’ve discovered that drinking more than a few glasses of wine is “sooo not worth it” because, once you hit your forties, hangovers are like childbirth crossed with food poisoning, and a touch of death. No, the reason I find myself nodding at the ad is because I empathise with the child.
I’m the one clattering around the house on weekend mornings, clanking pots in the kitchen, and turning on the radio full-blast, in the hope that just one of them might venture from their bedrooms before I get to the stage of considering second breakfast. This is what happens when your children discover the joys of 12-hour sleeps, yet you’ve reached the stage when you can’t manage more than four hours in bed without a trip to the loo or a trek downstairs, to make sure you’ve locked the doors/turned off the heat/turned on the alarm.
There must be a sweet spot somewhere in between, right where you manage to enjoy a night’s sleep without having to get up to feed or soothe one of them, and they rise of their own accord at a time after dark and before noon. Sadly, I seem to have missed it.
Aoife O'Carroll is a separated mum living in Co Kerry with her two boys aged 17 and 14, and a girl aged 10.
