To sleep, perchance to dream.

Yeah, so, I know that Hamlet was sort of talking about death with that line, but I still think it's beautiful and worth quoting when you've just helped your sleepy baby lull herself to sleep for the night (hopefully)!

Another evening, another fifteen minutes or so spent rubbing Maia's back and swaddling her arms against her side with my hands (thus hindering any crawling and standing efforts). I was thinking today about all of this, and I recognized that the change in our patterns and practices with regards to sleep is completely logical. In the months before now, Brian and I were (no offense to us!) merely Maia's most frequent sources of warmth and milk. Our voices and smell were familiar, but they could have been exchanged with those of other people and she would have adjusted and been just fine. We were the ones who provided those basic needs (from Maslow's hierarchy) of human existence: food, clothing, shelter, etc.

Now, because of those months of meeting her basic needs, there's more to it than that. There's emotional comfort, intellectual stimulation, humor, and familiarity. We are "parents" now, in her mind, in many ways, rather than "the people who give me stuff most often." Thus it comes as no surprise that as Maia's ability to distance herself from us becomes more pronounced (with crawling and, soon, walking), she becomes more aware that we are what's familiar, we are the ones she can depend on, we are home to her.

There's a phrase called "nighttime parenting" that's really starting to mean a lot to me these days. As Maia's understanding of me as "a parent" increases, then her need to have me fill that role is going to become more prominent, even in the middle of the night, and as she drifts off to sleep. She's moving away from operating purely from instinct to a more social mode of existing in the world. Thank goodness for that! Some might argue that that's what makes us human.

Perhaps linked to all this, perhaps not: Maia made her first "joke" this weekend! When she woke up with us in the morning, I was smiling with her and watching her play. She had her paci in her mouth, and I took it and put it in mine. She watched me, laughed, took the paci from me, and then very deliberately put it back in my mouth. Giggles ensued, from us both! She did it several times to Brian and me, and laughed each time.

So there you are: a recognition of the difference between "them" and "me." She saw that as she put the paci in my mouth, it was funny because it wasn't something that I normally did. And she knew that her mouth and mine were the same thing, but on different people. Imagine the mental work and development that goes into all that!