I've battled insomnia issues on and off for most of my adult life. It took becoming a parent to finally discover a cure. The white noise machine. It's an unbelievably effective tool for helping me get to sleep. The constant, soothing sounds of soft rain and babbling brooks put me at ease and shuts my brain down in mere moments. I relax, my eyes get heavy and before I know it I'm going out.
There's one fairly significant problem with this. The only time I ever hear the white noise machine is when I'm in Grace's room tending to her when she wakes up in the middle of the night.
Every time she wakes up brings the same cruel torture. In my mind, all I want to do is take care of Grace, but all my body wants to do is give in and fall asleep. I'm a huge fan of rest, so it takes everything I have to fight off the temptation to close my eyes, just for a minute, and enjoy the cure I've been pursuing for so long. I'm ashamed to say that more than once, I've lost the battle.
I'll be sitting in the rocking chair feeding Grace, not making a sound in order to let the white noise machine do its job and soothe her, but all the calm, all the peace just overwhelms me. My eyes will close, my head will drop, and little Gracie will just keep on feeding. I'll wake up a moment later to discover my daughter covered in milk and none too happy with her dinner service, even more alert than before.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to be there for Grace whenever she needs me, but there's still that selfish instinct wishing that instead of soldiering through, I could just stay there in the rocking chair all night and enjoy a sound sleep with her in my arms. I realize that this'd be atrociously dangerous, of course, so I wouldn't act on it. I will, however, freely brainstorm ways to make this dream into a reality.
I'm thinking that any sleep feeding system needs to have redundant safety features, so rigging up a fail-proof harness and a halo of pillows around the floor in case she rolls is an absolute must. Even better, instead of pajamas I could dress Grace in some sort of Nerf-based sleepwear as added protection. I can attach her bottle to some sort of tripod in order to cover the feeding part, but I'd have to engineer some sort of solution to regulate the milk flow. Can't give her too much too fast while I'm asleep at the wheel. That ought to cover all of the bases I think.
Or, better yet, I can just make my wife take care of the overnight feeding every night and enjoy a sound sleep. There's no downside to that, right?
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