Sleep, Beautiful Sleep

I swear this is not hubris (so no lightning bolts or jinxes coming my way, please), but last night, the baby slept through the night. Technically, anyway, since in order to meet the formal criteria apprarently he only has to sleep for 6 consecutive hours, which he did last night, from 10pm til 4am. This is especially amazing because he's been sick since Friday (just a little snotty-nosed cold, thanks for asking). And I bet he would have slept at least another half hour or so, but I woke him up because I was too uncomfortable to wait and I didn't want to pump and then have him wake up and want to nurse. Even better, after I nursed him at 4 I went back to sleep at 4:30 and got another 2 hours of sleep until he woke up again, at which point Josh got up and got him and I went back to sleep for another hour. Woah.

I don't know whether this whole sleeping through the night thing will last...it probably won't. (And I'll probably pay for talking about it by having to get up 5 times tonight.) But it's a good sign, that there's a trend towards more sleep coming. Or at least that's how I choose to interpret it. I tell you, I almost didn't know what to do with my fabulous well-rested self today. I felt nearly normal, so much so that when the baby took a nice long morning nap, I zoomed around and cleaned the house (instead of sleeping). I did all kinds of silly little puttery things I wanted to do, like arranging flowers in vases, clipping the cats' nails, moving furniture around (we're still trying to assimilate a bunch of things we got from my grandparents' house), as well as the usual laundry/dishes/sweeping stuff. (I feel so...so...housewifeish talking about all this. What has my world come to?)

Ok, so I will talk about something else then. Let's see...

Yesterday I met up with my friend Linda and she and I took the baby and drove to Alameda to see our friend Michelene, who was in need of some girlfriend consult, as she is thinking of moving to Florida (which of course, as good girlfriends, we encouraged her to do, because it's good for her, even though selfishly we want her to stay). On the way there, we had the dramatic experience of getting in a car accident--luckily one of those minor "oh-my-god-the-guy-in-front-of-me-is-stopping-really-suddenly-oh-shit-THUMP" heart racing kind, not anything serious involving airbag deployment or tow trucks. (In fact the baby slept through the whole thing.) The good news is that the guy I hit didn't want to bother with insurance exchange (because of course he was in a great big burly pickup truck and it didn't even get scratched, while my poor wagon got a big scratch, dent, and popped grill from his trailer hitch). The bad news is that my poor car got the worst of it, and realistically I probably won't even bother to spend the couple grand to fix it. And of course the really good news is that no one was hurt--as Linda said "wow, there was an angel watching out for us."

But other than that dramatic interlude, we had a great visit. ("Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?") I do dearly love my mama-friends, and I will sorely miss Mich if she does flee the state. And as if that wasn't bad enough, Linda is talking about bailing out of the Bay Area to go down to SoCal. Why is it so damn hard to financially make it here in the Bay Area? The housing market in particular is absolutely impossibly unreasonable. We are totally blessed to actually own a house, despite the crushing burden of debt it puts us in (and the type of employment it forces us into), and to have the education and experience and skill set so that we both can hold down decent jobs in order to pay for what we need. But we're still oh-so-slowly drowning here ourselves, with no savings (let alone a college nest egg) and the debt always growing faster than we can pay it down. I torture myself sometimes with the thought that we could cash out here and move out of state and have a totally different lifestyle (including easier or less work and a bigger better house), but I know we won't leave. Not only is this where our families are, but at least for me, this place (the Bay Area, in general, and Marin, in specific) is too rooted in my psyche to ever give it up without a fight. For me, this is home. But it makes me really sad to see my friends unable to stay here, and to slowly lose people to the vagaries of economics.

Hmm. From sleeping through the night to car accident to Bay Area bitching...I think this qualifies as a smorgasblog. I'd add some more unrelated stuff but really, I feel like I should go to sleep now that the baby's down for the night. ('Cause what if I *do* have to get up 5 times tonight? Sheesh. Now I'm working myself into a tizzy.) But wait! I know you've all been missing the cute pictures, right? (Yeah, I can hear the crowd roaring from here.) So here's a couple (don't forget, you can find more cute pix on Isaac's website, updated weekly):

^ Yeah, he looks like his daddy.

^ Mini-Josh meets Mini-Me. (And Mini-Josh is not pleased.)

^ Michelene meets Isaac.

Now, goodnight!