My Baby is the Worst Roommate

It's time to move her into her own room, but for a daisy chain of annoying reasons, we can't

One of the songs they had us sing in elementary school music class started like this: “There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, there’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, a hole.”

The rest of the song consisted of a call and response between a husband and wife– a husband complaining about problems and the wife advising him on how to address the problems. By the end of the song, we understand that none of the problems can be solved because in order to fix the problems with fixing the original problem (hole in bucket) there needs to not be a hole in the bucket.

I’m in a similar moment right now in my quest to achieve some sort of sustained happiness or at the very least contentedness; it would be better for everybody in my life (especially my husband) if I was more happy, or at least emotionally consistent. But right now, more often than I should be, I’m still what my shrink would call “disregulated”-- oscillating between despair, sadness, irritability, anxiety, a feeling of being overwhelmed, boredom, existential terror, and, occasionally, resignation.

It’s because I’m sleep-deprived, again. Juniper’s latest nighttime regression has arrived like a turd at a pool party. Oh, were you having fun? Out of the water while we deal with this shit.

I would be getting better sleep if we could enact some semblance of sleep training to get over this hump. But we cannot attempt any form of sleep training as long as her crib is in our room, which it is.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends babies sleep in the same room as their parents for the first year of life, which, like a handful of other recommendations by the AAP, strikes me as so impractical to the lived reality of many American families that it’s borderline insane.

I know there are people who don’t have the space to move the baby into a separate bedroom and must either learn to eventually adapt or try to white knuckle a bimonthly sleep regression without losing their minds.

And maybe some babies do great sleeping in the same room as their parents for twelve damn months. I can picture the looks of pristine satisfaction on the faces of parents describing how their Good Babies slept through the night when they were three months old or whatever, and my eyelid twitches with jealousy. Or maybe it’s twitching because of all of the caffeine I must consume in order to function during daylight hours. My daughter is hilarious and very cute and I love her just the way she is, but when it comes to sleep, she has never been a Good Baby, and never been the kind of baby who can share a room with us for a year without it being untenably disruptive.

So the solution is: move the baby into her nursery, right? Easier said than done! The nursery is not ready to have her moved in yet, because in order to ready the nursery for her occupation, we basically have to rearrange both our bedroom and her bedroom, a project that will take all of our attention and energy for at least a day and won't be possible for at least the next few weeks.

We have to rearrange the entire nursery because we discovered too late that the place where we had planned on putting her crib is the hottest place in the entire house, sharing an exterior wall that is pummeled by the southern California sun from early afternoon until sundown every day. The room where the baby is supposed to sleep is so hot that we have to shut the door during the afternoon in order to keep that room from making the rest of the house too hot. We need to wait until the sun is slightly less spicy and darkness comes earlier to consider putting a baby to sleep in that room.

There is one wall in that room that is slightly less hot than the corner we’d originally planned for the crib and also happens to be near the AC vent, but that wall is currently a gallery wall covered in framed space-themed artwork, and it’s not safe to put a crib below a wall of pointy picture frames anywhere, much less in earthquake country.

So: adjust to sleeping with her in the room? Also impossible. Juniper can tell when I am in the room with a sensitivity that seems almost extrasensory. She’s like the sound-monsters from A Quiet Place, except she can sense mom’s nervous bedtime vibes, and once she's fully awake, it's all over. She will be awake for at least an hour.

We’ve tried sneaking into our bedroom like cat burglars, in complete darkness, several minutes apart. We’ve tried going to bed closer to the time she goes to bed, or later in the evening. We’ve done the calm warm bath and soothing bedtime story, but that only hypes her up.

The last solution to the problem we’ve bandied about is I go to a hotel for a night or two and have Josh take one for the team while I return from the brink of insanity.

Maybe there’s hope.

Somebody once described caring for a baby as comparable to looking after a small pet that changes into a different animal every four weeks. I’ve found that to be mostly true, for better or worse. Everything cute Juniper used to do– whisper a “khhh” sound while being held, thumping her feet angrily on her crib mattress when she wanted to be picked up, stopping whatever she was doing to turn and smile when I hummed the melody to “How Far I’ll Go” from Disney’s Moana– has all been retired to make way for a new set of baby quirks. She’ll get over this latest snag, and we’ll re-enter a phase of relative calm and decent nights of sleep.

But if she hits another sleep regression before her nursery is cool enough for human habitation, we’re back to “there’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza" and I will probably need to start sleeping during the day.

Image via Shutterstock