As Mommies, we tend to take on the role of night-nurse given we are the first to wake up when a baby cries.

We nurse our babies from the time they are born so it seems logical when a child cries out in the night it is Mommy who goes running.

I heard of women whose husbands shared feeding duties (where possible) when it came to night time feedings of a newborn. As I said, I have only heard of these women, I suspect they live in far off lands where servants steep their tea and feed them toast points and foie gras every day at 4pm.

The Daddy would prepare the bottles or rock the baby in the chair while Mommy banked a couple of coveted minutes of sleep. When you are nursing exclusively however, Daddy waking up doesn’t really help except make the entire family tired and someone really should be up for the bacon and egg shift around 7am.

I used to cringe when I had been up in the night fifty times with a newborn baby; first feeding, then rocking her, then just staring into her little eyes, then realizing, what am I doing, I really need to sleep. Greg would wake in the morning and say, “That was a great night, did the baby even wake up?” and I would look for the first blunt object and begin my aggressive swinging campaign.

I feel it is only fair after years of getting up in the night with the kids that we play by the rules…as invented by me.

If a child yells, “Mommy!” which happens 99% of the time, I feel responsible for checking things out. Mostly because hearing your own name/title shouted makes you feel needed and there is some satisfaction knowing you’ve been selected as the one person on earth who can fix whatever is bothering your child.

If however the child shouts, “Ahhh!!” “Help” or any other gibberish, it should be up to the judge’s ruling (me) to determine who gets out of bed (Greg).

Let me be clear, I could count these instances on one bottle nipple but the other night, we heard a squeal, neither one of us knew which of our children was in distress but I decided (as the self appointed judge) because it was a weekend and would not interfere with a busy work day for Greg the next day, because we had gone to bed early enough he had already banked a few comfortable hours of sleep and because it is a leap year, that Greg should be the one to get out of bed.

Totally disoriented, he made his way to the bedroom door to follow the sound of the shouts. I think he made it just far enough so that his body was completely out of the bedroom doorway and out of my sight, looked for smoke and flames and crawled immediately back into bed. When I asked him who was crying and why he said, “They’re all asleep. Everything is fine.”

Hmmmm

I think most mothers approach each child with the look, listen and feel technique moving quickly from room to room should someone be in actual distress. First we look for discoloration in the face and all extremities, sometimes using a flashlight in addition to our x-ray vision to scan the room for things that fly in the night, creepy crawly things on the wall or a street light casting a shadow in the shape of a frog dead lifting a mallet, mouthing the words, “I’ll get you my pretty.”

We feel foreheads for fevers and backs of necks and knees for shivers, we pull blankets up or lower them as required by the sleepers’ current body temperature.

We place two fingers under the child’s nose careful never to make contact with upper lip skin startling them awake but close enough we can feel warm breath. We check our stop watches to time the exhales to ensure no one is hyperventilating.

We do this for all subsequent children before feeling mildly comfortable enough to climb back into bed, about a 90 minute process.

When Greg asks in the morning, “That was a great sleep. Nobody made a sound.” The bacon and eggs had better be ready.