It doesn't seem like it's only been a week since I last wrote, but Baby Time doesn't move in the same way as normal time. When you have no idea how much you'll sleep (if any), and when, days cease to be distinct entities and before you know it, what feels like one really long and difficult day turns out to be an entire month.

Tomorrow, Eva will be four weeks old. I could wait to write this until tomorrow, but I have no idea what tomorrow will hold. Right now, Brad is holding Eva on the couch and keeping her just one notch shy of a full-on screaming fit and giving me some time to write.

Scratch that, now she's screaming.

I feel bad writing while my daughter is screaming, but I sort of did my time already today, when I brought her to the doctor. After several hours of poking, prodding, and even a chest x-ray (boy did I feel terrible for exposing her to radiation at the tender age of four weeks), it turns out nothing's terribly wrong with our daughter. She may have a cold or acid reflux. Or, and I have a sneaking suspicion this is the case, she is just noisy and we will be doomed to never sleep again.

This past week, Eva has regressed back into the habit she had in her first week of refusing to sleep in a crib or bassinet. Something about being on her back, or maybe something about being not physically attached to Brad or me, makes her very, very angry. She wakes herself up screaming every time. Sleep has been a nightmare, and it was never great to begin with. She becomes so overtired by evening that we have to deal with hours of screaming or breaking our backs trying desperately to keep her from screaming. By midnight or 1am, she tends to collapse into a fitful sleep because she's so exhausted.

Last night we tried a few new variables in her sleep routine. It seemed to work and Brad and I whispered to each other in glee as she slept at the miraculously early hour of 10:40pm. We were almost giddy with excitement that we may have found something that worked. It seemed like such a blessing just to be lying there in bed, together, at the same time, rather than dealing with her in shifts.

And then she started making the Noise. The Noise is an indescribable grunting, throat-clearing, baby-Wookiee screech that comes in fits and starts and often crescendos to decibles you wouldn't believe an 8-pound human being could possible be capable of producing. She's made this noise a few times in the past, but last night, it accompanied almost every one of her exhalations. She continued to sleep and we knew she desperately needed the sleep so we didn't even consider rousing her, and time dragged on and we simultaneously marveled that she was actually sleeping and became more and more disbelieving at the cruel irony that her sleep and our sleep was quickly becoming mutually exclusive because she was just so noisy.

At first, the Noise was annoying because it was keeping us from sleeping and then we started to get worried and we leaned in close to try to figure out if she was breathing enough, and we touched her skin to see if she felt feverish and we discussed over and over whether there was something terribly wrong with her or whether we were simply cursed with a baby who has suddenly decided to be that noisy.

Then at 3:30 in the morning, after her second feeding, she decided that instead of going back to sleep, she'd start screaming inconsolably. I had gotten maybe an hour or two of sleep the previous night and my brain is so gone these days I honestly can't remember what had happened that night (and it was only the night before last) that had led to my getting so little sleep. Anyway, after about a half-hour of trying unsuccessfully to console her, Brad finally took her from my arms, told me to go to sleep, and went out to the living room where he eventually got her to fall asleep in his arms and he dozed, sitting up. I collapsed into a sleep-paralysis-plagued nap of several hours and I'm sure that's the only thing that has allowed me to function at all today.

Sometimes I feel like I have to write about these bad times because writing about them is tangible proof of surviving them. Nobody but Brad understands what the nights are like. Eva is good-natured and all-around lovely during the day when other people see her, so nobody believes how difficult she is at night. People tend to laugh off my comments as though I'm just being kind of flippant when I talk about how hard things are. The good news (ha) is that her fussy times are coming earlier and earlier every day so soon they'll start to overlap with all of our visits and outings and people will finally have to start believing me.

So I finally brought her to the doctor today with the ridiculous hope that there might be some medical reason for her unhappy grunting, something that's fixable and that will imply there will be an end to this before she's ready to move out of the house. I didn't get much for medical advice, other than to have her sleep propped up. It's nice to get approval for allowing her to sleep this way (sometimes I feel like if you allow your baby to sleep in any way other than flat on her back in a bassinet or crib, you're seen as dooming her to die of SIDS), but I have little hope that it'll do much good.

Before I had a baby, I always said my nightmare was that I'd get an inconsolable, fussy, screaming baby. I worried I'd have a baby that cried all the time. Sometimes I feel like that's what I got. I know, logically, that she will grow and develop and she won't be a newborn for eternity, but it still feels that way. I can't even feel victorious that I've reached the end of a day because there is no such thing as the end of the day in my world anymore. I just look at the clock at some point and it's 3 or 4 in the morning and I have to start referring to a few hours ago as "yesterday" instead of "today".

It's just a good thing I would do anything for this baby. She seems to test this principle every day and every day I manage to make good on it. And now it comes down to what I really wanted to write about when I sat down to my computer: how grateful I am for Brad and everything he's done since Eva's birth to help keep me sane. He's truly an equal partner in this and there are times I feel like he does more than his fair share of parenting. I don't know how I could have done this without him here with me every day, and I've never been more thankful for this shitty economy and his unemployment. Eva has two full-time stay-at-home parents right now and neither one of us could imagine doing it without the other (I don't want to think about what it's going to be like once one of us has to go back to work). More than anything else, Brad makes me look forward to the future and realize how amazing our family of three is going to be.