My Kind of 4am

So this morning I awoke to an unsettled, teething and hungry little one, at the glorious hour of 4:00 am.  If you can't sense the sarcasm there, I can try to kick it up a notch. Anywho... Sometimes Annaliese gets a little off schedule and naps real early in the morning to where she stays up all day and gets tired around 6:00pm which is way too early for her to go to bed for the night.  This happened yesterday.  She fell asleep around 7:00pm and there was no keeping her awake at that point.  So we laid her in her crib and pretty much placed bets on when she would be getting up next.  Around 9:30pm I had finished watching Mr. Popper's Penguins - great Jim Carrey movie by the way,  and headed to bed thinking "Maybe she will still sleep through the night".  Well I was wrong.  She woke up about 10:30pm hungry and because she fell asleep too early the two nights prior, we decided to give her a calming bath and make her bedtime bottle and try to put her back to sleep.  Well this actually worked.  It took her until about 11:30 to go back to sleep, but she did.  She woke up again around 1:30am with some gas, so I burped her and rocked her back to sleep.  Here's the 4:00am part.  The sleep stopped there.  Now I can't complain.  I mean really she got a lot of sleep between the hours of 7:00pm and 4:00am, however...mommy didn't. 


I said all that to lead me to this.  I made her a bottle, got myself a cup of coffee and was barely ready to start my morning.  As I was feeding her in the living room on the couch, I was browsing the TV guide.  Yeah.  Not a whole lot to choose from on TV at 4:00am.  Pretty much a bunch of infomercials and stuff that I wouldn't even let my cat watch, but after I browsed all 9,000 channels, I finally came across one of my ALL TIME FAVORITE movies, "The Newsies".  This movie /show/play is just one of those movies that can uplift me at any state.  I have seen it at least a bizillion times and wouldn't mind seeing it a bizillion more.  I jam out to the soundtrack on my iphone in my car, in the shower, while I cook...anywhere!  "The Newsies" has a way of taking me back to my childhood.  When I didn't really have a care in the world and wanted to sing and dance all day.  The days when I came home from school, played some video games with my brother, and had a family bicycle ride around the neighborhood.  Sometimes we would even head to the beach.  (I lived 5 blocked from the Pacific Ocean in California- yes I miss it).  Watching that movie just makes me want to "Open the gates and sieze the day" (one of the songs in the soundtrack).  It also makes me want to break out my old posters of Christian Bale too, but that's besides the point.  It's just my favorite movie.  It's my feel good movie.  I think I can honestly say I love "The Newsies" better than "Grease", which is almost insane to even think about, because for years I was obsessed with that movie and it's soundtrack also. 


And there I was...watching my favorite movie, with my favorite little human drinking my (new-as of me becoming a parent) favorite beverage.  It made getting up at 4:00am much more bearable.  I sat and thought of a post that my fellow blogger friend, Alison had recently written called "Notes To Self: The 3am Edition" and what she says is true.  Waking up with your baby (in her case, a newborn) in the middle of the night isn't a sacrifice, it's a privilege.  They aren't going to need you forever, so soak it up now.  It's very easy to get lost in life and forget the little things that we take for granted each day. 


So for the last  nearly 8 months, among many other lessons I've learned being a mother, I'm reassured every day that time is oh so precious and flies by oh so fast.  That's the bittersweet truth.  And when waking for a 4am feeding, 3am feeding, midnight feeding... take it all in and enjoy every single sleepless moment.

 


What's your favorite movie of all time?  What does it make you think and feel when you watch it?