The little guy woke me up today at 5:00 in the morning by chewing on my cheekbone.  He has a pair of tiny razor-sharp teeth on the bottom, so the chewing, which used to be cute and fun, was painful enough to wake me up right away.   Yesterday he found my ear and chewed on it, and the day before he kicked me in the face.  Also, we don’t co-sleep, so how is he getting into bed?

My wife brought him into our bed, in an attempt to cuddle some extra sleep out of him.  He usually will fall asleep after we try this maneuver, but today it just did not happen.  He crawled around, still super tired, looking like a drunk man searching under the table at the bar for the car keys his friends took away from him.  When he does this, he will periodically drop his head to the bed, and almost fall asleep.  As if noticing that we would win the sleep battle, he will then whipped his head up with a sigh, and go back to the drunken-man crawl on the bed.  This continued today for about 30 minutes when finally I decided the extra grunts he emitted meant he needed a bottle.  After feeding him, he continued to do the crawl around the bed, but eventually fell asleep, and slept for 3 more hours.

There is a major difference between the person I am at 5:00 compared to the person I am at 8:30. At 5:00, I am not super thrilled about anything and kind of go on auto-pilot making the bottle and feeding him.  I do not even enjoy the cuteness of the drunken-man crawl – but I will take a moment to note it for later, when I feel like a good laugh.  At 8:30, I can reflect on it and laugh, and can go about the day in a little better spirits.

The little guy is obviously not aware enough to be concerned if we are tired or not, and truthfully, it does not really matter if we are tired.  He needs a loving, happy father to be there for him, even if I did not get a good night of sleep.  Regardless, I act like I am outraged by the cheekbone chewing early in the morning, but the fact is I oddly love it because it means my son is healthy and active, and I love it when he is playing or crawling on me.  I just need to work with him on the timing 😉