A Visit From The Leprechauns

A piercing shriek permeated through the air and woke me from my slumber at exactly 6:00 a.m. I jumped from the bed and raced to the babies' room to witness a truly chaotic site. Hope had managed to squirm her way out of her swaddle, diaper, and detach her leads. Grace screamed like a banshee on the moors of Scotland with her arm dangling from the crib. The scene looked as if our nursery had been ransacked by a group of leprechauns looking to cause mischief! Panic-stricken, and somewhat dumbfounded, I did the only thing I could, given the circumstances, and yell "JENI!" louder than Forrest Gump. Jeni raced in, dazed, to witness the scene of the crime. Both girls were wide awake and more than a little irritable.

"When was the last time you fed the girls?" I asked.

"Around midnight," my wife replied.

Somehow everyone in the Piper household had managed to sleep through the scheduled late-night feed. These girls had gone over 5 hours without a feed and were not happy about it. I raced to the kitchen to begin to warm up a bottle for Grace while Jeni went to breast feed Hope. While Grace at her meal, Hope did not do well with her feeding, and would neither nurse nor take a bottle.

"We're bad parents," Jeni said as she began to cry. Somehow, despite a baby monitor, a dog and our own usual good sense of getting up in the middle of the night this week, we had overslept their feeding and felt absolutely awful about it. Hope was particularly distressed at the time, and her stubbornness to feed only compounded our disappointment in ourselves for not waking earlier to get them up to eat.

Jeni and I are both people who need our sleep. While we are both night owls more so than early birds, not having at least 7 hours of sleep, coupled with the emotional d'enouement of the week and the physiological fact that adrenaline can only take you so far, had finally caught up with us.

Where was the baby monitor? Where was Maggie? How could we have slept through this? All of these questions and many more raced thought out hearts and minds. Several of Maggie's toys laid scattered between the living room and our bedroom. Perhaps our lovable dog thought that we would be roused from our coma of sleep if she brought us her giant stuffed strawberry, dragon, or her new bff, the six-legged octopus. This, however, did not do the trick.

All day, Jeni and I have bemoaned our poor parenting for not getting up. My good friend Pam at school and I chatted for a bit today, and she reassured me that these things happen to all parents, and are nothing to be worried about. Pam was right. Throughout the afternoon and evening, both girls did incredibly well with their feedings, naps, and somehow or another, despite the odds, managed to get themselves back on a consistent schedule. Hope chowed down full bottles this afternoon and evening and so did Grace. If anything, Grace may have improved her feedings and needed less breaks as she bottle or breast fed.

While Jeni and I view these girls being home as a miraculous event, we need to keep in mind a simple fact- we're human. We are going to make tons of mistakes as parents and today is the first of what will be many days when we will wish we had a "do-over" with our own kids. The magic of these girls, however, is that they are resilient and are able to overcome obstacles like missing a feeding. Sure, they were not happy about it, but by late afternoon, they had managed to get themselves back on track. As humans, too, we realize that we need our sleep. We can't function on adrenaline and love alone and need to build in time for ourselves to recharge so that we can best meet the needs of our growing girls.




Maggie, nestled at the foot of our bed, curls herself into a ball. Even she is beat after this week.










The "snuggle sisters" look cute in their coordinating outfits (note: it took Jeni three "tries" to get me to produce the correct pink hat that matched Grace's pink outfit. Everyone, including Daddy, learns something new every day.)