The Girl Who Wouldn’t Sleep
“I’m not ready to sleep and you can’t make me!”
That message came through loud and clear yesterday as Maddie outlasted her everyone in sight including her grandmother and both of her parents. When this 7-week old baby doll takes a stand – she digs in for the nuclear winter. Her newest project this weekend was to single-handedly defeat the institution of sleep.
She woke up Sunday morning determined to disprove the notion that babies actually need sleep. Her eyes were just like the wolf’s in Little Red Riding Hood – “My Maddie, what big eyes you have!”
Her normal nap after the 5am feeding was called off due to a complete lack of interest, but we kept our spirits up knowing that the 9am feeding would completely knock her out. But according to Maddie, this was a special day – a day that would not be wasted by doing something so trivial as sleeping.
Maybe she was primed to go a stunning two wins and zero losses in her looming Fantasy Football contest. The Marauding Madsters were heavy favorites, but as team owner, Maddie knows to be calm and act like you have been there before.
At 1pm, you had to like our chances for the baby to get some sleep – but this schedule would conflict with the early games on the NFL docket. Maddie headed upstairs with her Grandmother and take in the Redskins game even though she had no vested interest in this particular contest. MiMi says Maddie seemed to get a little bit of sleep, but noticed that the little girl was secretly checking out the fantasy stats that were scrolling underneath the game on the television screen.
Surely the 5pm feeding would be ticket to trigger a massive sleeping event. Wrong again – Maddie was primed and ready to pull an “All-Dayer” as opposed to an “all-nighter.” Each waking moment only seem to strengthen her resolve.
At the 10pm feeding – Stay Home PaPa was running on fumes and the baby’s alert eyes told him all he needed to know – another showdown of cosmic proportions. Maddie ripped through her bottle in record time, but had no intention of going down without a fight. Putting her in the crib only ramped things up. I cajoled, coaxed and crowed all to no avail – Maddie wanted entertainment and there would be no bedtime without it!
I did a little song and dance, we took little strolls and practiced some extra burping sessions – surely she couldn’t keep this up – but she did. All seemed lost when finally, just before midnight, Princess Insomnia finally passed out on Dad’s chest. We can only hope and pray that this was just a one-day anomaly.
Stay Home PaPa 
September 22, 2011 at 2:04 am
she IS a baby doll!