How to make a bottle at 3:00 a.m.

A lack of sleep can confuse even the best of us. I thought I knew what it was to experience little or no sleep, but staying up to watch the Royal Wedding one night a couple years ago didn’t prepare me as much as I thought it would. These days I stare at the TV enjoying a program only to have my husband walk by and say, “Honey, you have to turn it on first.” So, it helps me to make a list for even the simplest of tasks. Here’s one of them.

HOW TO MAKE A BOTTLE AT 3:00 a.m.*

1. Wake and wonder why your alarm sounds like a baby crying.
2. Realize for the 375th time that your baby does not come fully equipped with snooze button.
3. On two hours of sleep, pick up your crying hungry baby and trudge downstairs for supplies.
4. Calmly explain to your four-month-old that his food will be ready soon and that this process will take a short amount of time. Discover that somehow this logic seems lost on your little one as he now begins to slowly pull your out hair out and put it in his mouth.
5. Count down the seconds until the water is hot enough to warm up the milk bottle. (Briefly wonder how they warmed up water in two minutes during the Dark Ages, but shake off that thought as your baby is now crossing over into a dark age of his own.)
6. Watch as your now “hangry”  (hungry + angry) baby decides to re-enact a scene from Poltergeist and pull off his own face.
7. As your baby has not succeeded in satisfactorily pulling off his own face, your baby now tries to pull off your face.
8. Take warm milk out of container and pour it into the bottle without spilling a precious drop. (Silently thank your friends for those many years of playing the game “Operation,” as they have now paid off.)
9. Place bottle in already open mouth of baby, and feed baby.
10. Muse that your baby does, in fact, come equipped with a snooze button.
* Also applicable for 2:04am, 4:22am and 5:17am.