A Mommy Story

While Mira does seem to have colic, at least she’s sleeping her long stretches at night. She generally gives us a three or four hour stretch starting at midnight, and then wake again a couple of hours later and nurse on and off in bed until 8am. (The good news – I seem to have enough milk for her now.)

This makes me very happy, because I’ve never been one to handle sleep deprivation well. If I’m ever interrogated by the government or terrorists, they will be able to break me after one night of no sleep. While Aaron often lives on only five hours of sleep a night, I prefer eight hours to function at peak performance. Of course, I have a newborn, so I’m lucky to get five or six hours, but that’s generally enough to keep me upright, if a little fuzzy headed.

So you can imagine how I feel when I tell you that last night I got about an hour of sleep all night. And that wasn’t a consecutive hour, either. Baby crying? Nope. Toddler with nightmares? Nope. Loud block party? Nope.

It was the damn smoke detectors.

I swear these things are possessed. I’ve written about them before and the torture they’ve caused. The detectors never have any problems during the day. They sit and wait until nighttime, when everyone is sleeping, to sound off and drive us insane.

But earlier episodes were nothing like last night. Because it wasn’t the low-battery chirping sound keeping us awake. It was the alarm going off full-blast for 5-10 seconds, at random intervals ranging from 5 minutes to one hour. All. Night. Long.

The first alarm had me jumping out of bed, startled and confused and worried. I wondered if something was overheating in the house, so I conducted a top to bottom search, checking each room and sniffing for any hint of smoke or anything burning. Satisfied that there was no fire, I went back to bed, only to be jolted awake by another alarm a few minutes after I fell asleep.

Cordy slept through the first few alarms. But it couldn’t last forever, and soon we heard the soft cries coming over the monitor. Aaron went into her room to comfort her and get her back to sleep, while I got dressed and left the house at 3am to find batteries, hoping that it was a battery problem.

Finding batteries at 3am is not easy. I first went to a gas station, only to be told they were “temporarily closed”. So I drove a little more to the grocery store, but found they closed at 1am. Bastards. I drove a little further to my last chance: Wal-Mart. Folks, you think Wal-Mart is scary during the day? You should see it at 3am. I’ve never seen so many people with missing teeth in one place.

Batteries in hand, I returned home to find a crying Mira. I fed her while Aaron changed batteries. We thought that would be the end of things, but close to 4am the alarm sounded again. Taking the batteries out completely wouldn’t silence them – the smoke detectors are interconnected in the electrical system, and the batteries are just a backup. So we went to the source of the problem, and shut off the circuit. This left the batteries still in, so the alarms continued off and on through the morning.

Today, drunk on a lack of sleep, I stumbled around the house slowly removing batteries from each detector, waiting to see if that particular round plastic demon was the faulty one. Each time the alarm shrieked, Cordy dove onto the couch and pulled pillows and blankets over her head to hide from it. To make the day worse, Mira was awake and crying much of the afternoon as well, so there was no rest to be had.

The alarms are now silenced, only because we have turned off the circuit and pulled all the batteries out. Tomorrow I’ll be looking for a fire alarm repair company to come out and fix the problem. I may ask them to completely replace the damn detectors just to end having their beady little green LED lights staring at me, waiting to attack again.

In the meantime, I hope Mira sleeps well tonight, because mommy needs sleep.