Baby LJ, now 10 months, has not been sleeping well for the majority of his short life, not well at all. I feel well qualified to say that when we are deprived of sleep we become obsessed by it, desperate for it to wash over us and furious with it when it doesn't arrive.
As i lie awake at 4am, I pray that the next time I lay my little poppet into his cot, he will stay asleep and I am "priveleged" to have the time to listen to the Hackney dawn chorus - tweeting birds, accompanied by police sirens. I ponder on how we take sleep for granted, how we never really appreciate it until it is gone, how we assume it will always be there and how much we should have told it we loved it when it was!
This leads me to think about the many ways in which motherhood changes our lives, how things are taken away, but replaced with others, often infinitely more enriching and fulfilling. One hazy, late summer afternoon last year, our group of NCT friends and babies, walked en mass into the undergrowth, just north of our local park. Buggies lined up in a row, all the mums disappeared into the bushes to pick berries. We swapped our blackberry's for blackberrying with the buggies and we were beautifully, lost in the moment.
