Lucy’s not sleeping well, and when Lucy’s not sleeping well, no one is.

I made the mistake of trying to solve this problem with a little help from some web forums when Abby was a baby, so I know enough to just commiserate and feel better at the end – avoid all the guilt. (If you ever want to feel like a horrible mother for suggesting your baby might be old enough to learn to calm herself down, search “cry it out” and read some of the crazy comments on the forums that pop up. Oooh, so not helpful.)

No, I’m fighting this battle alone (well, with Dave, whose ribs meet my elbow a few times a night: “Your turn.”) Lucy’ll wake three to five times a night, apparently because she – who can’t even coordinate bringing her hands to her mouth in a swift movement, has figured out that I exist and can be summoned with a cry. The little evil genius.

The Books That Know Everything But Don’t Tell You How to Actually DO These Things When It’s 3 in the Morning and You’re Exhausted suggest that I let her know I’m there for her – without going to her crib every time.

Oh, that’s helpful. I’ll send her an e-card. Maybe gift her a virtual pet on Facebook. You know, to let her know I’m thinking about her.

Rolling eyes here: No. Not helpful.

There’s wisdom less-tired people can grasp in that advice, but I am not less-tired people. I want to know how to tell a 4 ½ month old that I’m “there for her” when I really want to say “I’ll give you 20 bucks, kid, if you stay quiet ’til 6:30.”

See, there’s an older sibling involved. Abby wakes up for the slightest disturbance (and that unexpected fireworks show the other night at the college near our house did not qualify as a “slight” disturbance. Holy nightmare.) (Wow, that was a colorful vocab lesson at 10 o’clock at night.)

Anyhow, so I’m not about to let Lucy cry it out – not because I’m anti-CIO (as the moms are calling it these days, I hear) but because if I let Lucy cry it out, Abby’ll follow. Try explaining what 3 a.m. means to a toddler. Go ahead. Come on over and try it. See if YOU can talk her down from her demands: “I want UP, I want Froot Loops! I want’a wear pretty DRESS.” “It’s not time to wake up, lay down; we’ll get Froot Loops later.” “I WANT FROOT LOOPS.” “Shhh, it’s nighttime, it’s not breakfast –” “FROOT LOOOOOOPS!”

No, letting the baby cry it out isn’t on my game plan. But is waking up this often each night til she’s, what, 18 months old, part of my plan? Pffsh, no. I need another idea.

I generally secretly roll my eyes when people say things like “Enjoy your kids, the time goes so fast!”, because when they’re saying these things to me I’m usually knee-deep in dirty towels and wearing clothes that smell like spit up and I’m not feeling like the time’s flying by with any amount of mercy.

Dude, have you seen my to-do list? This baby won’t leave my hip; she’s magnetically attached to it, and she can’t be tricked to play in the bouncy chair or the exersaucer for longer than a few minutes.

No, “fast” isn’t the word I’m looking for.

But Dave carried our Zuma up from the basement and we snapped Lucy inside and while we took pictures of her pushing her first spoonsful of rice cereal out of her mouth with a snarl, it hit me: This is flying. I have a baby eating cereal. Oh-em-gee.

The bassinet’s already history, banished to the basement; same with the baby bathtub. Where did summer go? The season of fighting with Dave over his fantasy football drafts – plural, because what fun is just one or two leagues! Erin! Why limit yourself! – and all its “research” time and “lineup” time and “just checking the score” time is about here. And with it: changing out the 3-month for the 6-month clothes, bringing up the high chair, breaking out the rest of the baby toys. (Cleaning the carpets … My to-do list is insane.)

Sunday morning “pretend football” time aside, fall will likely go just as fast; something not lost on me as the kids in our neighborhood rode by on their bikes on the first day of school. GASP. Abby’ll be there in what, two years? Three if I opt out of 4-year-old kindergarten? I can’t push four, though, even if she’s still just grasping there are numbers need to go in sequential order. Oh, ugh, I’m not ready.

And we said this was it. Literally: “THIS IS IT,” I think were my delivery room words. “NO MORE KIDS.” I think after spending 40 long weeks with me repeating that phrase, Dave was worn down to agree: “Fine! No more! Two’s great!”

I’m not second-guessing that – because I have to say that, because Dave’s reading right now and he just spilled coffee down the front of his shirt in alarm – but when my friends start talking seconds and thirds, will I really be ready to pass them the ridiculously clunky baby bathtub or the nifty Zippy, or the outfits with the little elephants on them (because in all my daydreams my third child would be a girl)?

I don’t know. Maybe? Probably? Dave’s nodding.

If baby Lucy were any more relaxed we’d have to knock on her belly every so often to make sure she hadn’t turned into stone. Ninety percent of her four months have been filled with nothing but drooly smiles, chubby cheeks just begging to be pinched; she just goes with it.

This week’s not one of those 90 percent.

She arrived home from her week at Grandma and Grandpa’s with, I don’t know, ISSUES. She’s got beef  about eating, or not eating. Feed her? Bottle in her mouth? No? Yes? Yes, there she swallowed a few, WAIT, just kidding, it’s dribbling down her chin and into the deep, unexplored crevasses of her neck. One second she wants to eat, another she squirms like a cat on its back in my arms, its spine flinging the rest of its body to the floor.

None of this alarms me or causes me particular grief, except when her, what do you call it? Episode? seeps into Abby’s bedtime. I’m coping because my “whatever, dude” baby is easily soothed with a walk in her Zippy, or with a steady shushing in her ear, or with a few laps around the first floor of our house in my arms. Easier than pie.

Plus I’m good at lying to myself. That helps.

Yes: I keep telling myself it’s teeth. You know what? EVERYTHING is teething. Everything. Since she hit three months, every unexplained crying jag has been teething. Wait, make that “teething.” Are her gums red and angry-looking? Well. I don’t know, it’s all gums to me. Is she drooling? Yes, but that’s kind of her schtick, she’s a drooler (and this fact I will exploit on her first dates-turned-last dates her whole teenage life).

“Teething” is the magical expression. A fussy baby in your arms? Bounce her on your hip and shake your head sympathetically at all who look at you, and just saying “teething.” “Teething, tsk, tsk, poor thing,” I say, and onlookers nod or give me an obligatory “man, that sucks,” and I don’t look like a complete moron.

It’s working too – so much so that I believe it, and I’m peering into her mouth for teeth that aren’t coming yet, and I’m wondering how long I can play the teething card til some actually show up.

Aren’t they teething for like their first 4 years? Their whole lives? Can’t we blame it all on teething?

Dave’s onto me. “Is she really teething? How long does it take til they pop out?”

“I don’t know, the poor thing.”

Ha. I am the only mother on the planet, probably, who’s looking forward to her actually getting teeth.

I’m not a joiner.

Mom’s fault, if you’re into blaming people: She wouldn’t let me join Brownies because, I don’t know, she didn’t want to sell cookies or maybe she was paying me back for that dance class I wanted to be in; Wait, no I didn’t want to anymore; Whoops, did you already pay for that?

She let us join softball and choir. You know, maybe it had more to do with my lack of athletic ability, now that I’m thinking this through.

Anyhow, still not a joiner. End of story.

Except I had this baby, the first one, Abby; and everyone else in the world disappeared, it seemed. Dave disappeared to work, families were eight hours away, friends in our new hometown? Well, there were a couple of people from work? But since babies don’t enjoy nightlife, that was pretty well a non-issue. Apparently babies in bars is frowned upon.

And Abby had colic and was the kind of baby who, when I’d be tossed the softball of all new-motherhood questions: “Is she a good baby?”, I’d shake my head and bawl-bark “NO” and toss the baby to the questioner and flee. That is, if she weren’t already screaming in their face, in which case I’d have to do the respond-while-bouncing-back-and-forth dance and say “Of COURSE.”

Gradually I met one mom, and she introduced me to another, but it was until about three months ago that I could say I had mom friends, more than two; multiple.

So I joined this moms group this week. I know nothing of what this means, or what it’s like. I’m fluttering between nervousness (like the first day of junior high school nerves), and relief, because MAN is motherhood lonely.

I’m just hoping it’s not like the moms group I saw in the playground a few months ago: A group of moms with really complicated baby slings and more hemp jewelry on their persons than the normal human population were loudly complaining about baby formula because, as one woman eating a candy bar was saying while breastfeeding her baby at the park, “Formula’s full of POISONS!”

… and a few feet away, I fed a bottle of formula to Lucy, bowed my head and snorted a laugh. Whoops.

(Oh, like that candy bar is all natural.)

That was my first and worst impression of moms groups.

I don’t expect I’ll get the chance to loudly belittle another mom’s choices in public in this other group, but maybe that’s the point. Well, anyhow, I can’t say I’m not a joiner anymore.

We survived what turned into a 12-hour car ride – suffering through late-afternoon Chicago traffic; the highways where corn is the only (yaaaawn) scenery, and the “she won’t eat a cheeseburger” “yes, she will”, “no she won’t” argument at a gas station (I won that one, in case you were keeping track) (I am).

And, hey! no one got sick. I’ll take my successes in clean little bits.

We realized three-day trips with two kids just aren’t worth the drama they entail, but yes, we survived. (NEVER AGAIN.)

I almost made it out of the whole rotten week without a tear shed on my part … ’til it was time to hand the baby over to my mom and stepdad, who are watching them this week. All rational thoughts vanished: “She won’t even remember me next week!” “She doesn’t even know what’s going on!” “She won’t even be able to ask where I am!” “She’s going to hate me!”

Sigh. Yes, you sneer and say “it’s seven days! She’ll be fine!” and I snarl in return “EASY FOR YOU TO SAY” … There’s nothing rational about handing someone your baby for a week.

(Your toddler? Have you ever parented a toddler? There’s nothing UNNATURAL about handing someone your toddler for a week – I love her, I miss her dearly, but geez, sometimes that “wheeeeeeeeeemmmaaaaaamaaaa” whine makes me put on my Mean Mom Face, and that’s no good for wrinkles-prevention. I needed a break.)

After I breathed and talked myself down from the emotional ledge and placed Lucy’s car seat in my parents’ car, we slowly got back in our own car (our car without its two car seats in the back, the car with no sippy cup in the console, the one that had zero Goldfish crackers in it, except the ones smooshed into the floorboard).

“Oh, man, did you hear that?” Dave asked, starting the car.

“No, what?”

“No whining!” Then Dave launched into a re-enactment of a fit Abby’d thrown on the way to his parents’ house two days earlier. It was mid-Chicago, at the point in construction and traffic where it’d be easier to glue wings on the side of the car and lift yourself out of Illinois than it is to switch lanes and exit to the nearest gas station parking lot: “MAMA SNAAAAACK. FRUIT SNAAAAACK. MAAMAAAA, ABBY NEED FRUIT SNAAAACK.” (Because toddlers only speak in capital letters in the car.)

I tried to be the nice mom, the feeling mom who misses her kids, but I couldn’t help laughing. “Seven days of freedom, Dave.” Bad mama.

I KNEW this would happen. I knew it, that’s the thing that irks me the most. Abby was hanging on my leg, whining, wanting a hug when she’s usually begging for breakfast. I felt her forehead but it was 90 degrees outside and about a bajillion degrees in the closet where the ironing board is, so it was really just part of the charade of convincing myself she was just grumpy, but otherwise healthy.

But no amount of lying to myself could reassure me a half hour later. I knew then, before I even opened the bathroom door, that Dave would tell me the No. 1 thing on my “what I hate about the human body” list happened.

“Uh … We have a proooh-blem,” Dave said.

“She threw up, didn’t she.” We exchanged blank stares and hissed expletives under our breaths. “What do we do?”

“I don’t know, you’re the mom. You’re supposed to know what to do.”

I resent that. What to do? BOOK A HOTEL ROOM, was my first thought.

“OK. We’ll take Lucy to the sitter’s, and I’ll work a half day, I guess, if you stay home with her this morning.”

“OK.”

And then my heart raced, my palms went sweaty and I did a concious check of my own symptoms: Healthy, healthy, was I sweating because I was hot or EEEEP am I getting sick? Am I? And the baby? NO ONE TOUCH THE BABY. I will put her in a bubble and transport her out of here.

And then I fled for work. Fled is perhaps not quite strong enough. Tires were squealing in the driveway as I peeled out for the comfort of a building with no messy toddlers.

(You know, if there were a list of the most helpful mothers on the planet when vomit’s involved, I am not only listed behind mothers of apes, I’m also listed behind mothers of ameoba. I don’t DO vomit, except when I have to. And apparently when you’re a parent you have to. A lot.)

So. This, along with that pile of suitcases and the Zippy sitting in the dining room, all diligently packed last night and ready to go for our expected 7 a.m. departure for our vacation tomorrow. Right. And I was complaining about the trip before? Wait til the baby gets it, was my third thought, after the hotel thought and the realization that I have to steel myself against this and just deal.

Isn’t this always the way …

So there was a time we’d roll into our hometowns after being gone six months, and we’d make plans that in most cases didn’t even make a bleep on anyone’s radar. I have not seen that kind of freedom in months. Years.

These BABIES. UGH. Everyone wants a piece of these kids, so much so that from the second we get the first syllables of “We’re coming home” out of our mouths, all our families open their mouths like little birds, begging for time, more time, MORE TIME. TWEET, OVER HERE. MORE.

I’m finding out having two kids only makes the problem worse; it’s not like you can dangle one to the side and say “Ahhh-ha! Three days, but twice the fun!” Nod toward the bonus baby … No? Oh.

Dividing three days between our two families and our friends is about more than throwing three suitcases, the Zippy and some snacks into the car. It’s about something just this side of emotional warfare.

The actual drive isn’t the problem. We can a rig up a portable DVD player and for eight hours put up with Elmo shrieking in our ears from the backseat – but you can’t prepare for the emotional little bombs planted around the guilt of not ever having enough time to meet everyone’s fill. We’re always an hour or two short, and I’ve not yet invented the 25th hour of the day (though I’m working on it, and once I get it set you’re all going to thank me and I’ll be rich, RICH I tell you).

No one’s to blame, no one’s more or less guilty on either side, us or them. I get it, we had some kids. The kids are cute, the sweetest little smoochie-cheeked kids anyone could ever want to spoil. And it’s our fault we live so far away. True story, it is.

But … What to do, what to do, when we hear: “We never see you,” “We want to spend time with the kids,” “We NEVER, EVER see you”? What do we do? Feel guilty. Yeah, I suppose.

I get that everyone feels shorted and everyone’s pointing fingers at the time the others get to spend holding the baby whose hands smell like spit up because she chews them all day, and STOP, I just want to shout. Just stop.

“Would this get easier if we move home?”

“I don’t know. Or would everyone just fight about where we spend our weekends?”

“I think maybe you’re right. I do feel bad, though.”

“I know. But whaddya do?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either.”

“Well then. Let’s just avoid this conversation when we get there.”

“Like the plague.”

My mom asked, OK? Practically begged, actually: “Please please please can I watch your kids for a week?”

Let’s get that straight first: She asked.

I’m just the one who said yes. Or maybe it was more like “PLEASE. YES.” And that was just my ugly purple undereye circles talkin’. My greed didn’t even have a second to eke in its own “Oh-EM-GEE, YES. YES, YES, YES.”

Mom and my stepdad live eight hours away – far enough that they miss the throw-your-body-on-the-floor tantrums that are so impressive that the Olympics committee is considering making it a sport. This whole week-of-playing-Grandma thing is relaxing to Mom, and something she’s been freakishly counting down toward since there was still snow on the ground.

She’s calling this a vacation. Isn’t she cute? A vacation. Yes, it’ll be just like a vacation, minus the sand, sun, and sleeping in; with a little tantrum in the cereal aisle thrown in for good measure.

And Dave and I? What will we be doing when we’re not at work during this week of freedom? Uh … Not tiptoeing around Abby’s tantrum triggers. I’ll say the word “bed” instead of spelling it out – this is freedom.

Beyond that … I feel guilty for saying this, so I’ll whisper: I’m going to try to finish a book! And clean the closet! And go to the store without fruit snacks in my purse!

Downright sinful, this week will be.

“For a whole week?!” another mom asked me today.

Yes, a whole week. I know, I nodded. I know. A week. What was that look on her face? Horror? Jealousy? Confusion? “It’s going to be a little hard because I’m really going to miss Lucy,” I said, stopping awkwardly after her name like I’d come to a screeching verbal halt. SCREECH.

“But not Abby?” Laugh, laugh. Pause; cue needle ripping off a record.

Uh. Um. “I’ll miss Abby by Tuesday. It might be good for us to take a breather for a day,” I said, immediately wondering if the other mom understood what I meant: I love my kids. I love my toddler. But my toddler is 2 … Still, that nagging guilt jumped on my back and yelled “Backpedal, backpedal!” in my ear, so I stammered “I’m just kidding.”

She nodded. Mom code for “Got it.” Or “You lie.”

I’m going to make an excellent grandparent.

All the fun of parenting without the baby weight, right? No worrying about whether that tantrum I let Abby throw the other night will lead to her joining a gang. No late nights up with a sick kid. No coming home from a day at work to a child who wants to play The Battle of Wills, a really awful game with rules that stress that the winner never really wins, anyhow. But let’s play. ALL THE TIME.

I’m going to be awesome at it – grandparenting, not the Battle of Wills – I thought the other afternoon when I tried to sneak out the front door to grab the mail. I didn’t have both feet outside the door when Abby caught me with her freakishly observant peripheral vision.

“MAMA! ABBY HELP!” she cried, dropping her train on the carpet as she leapt up.

“I can get it, Abby, don’t worry about it,” I tried. No luck. She had to go outside with me. She had to open the box, hold the bills; she saw the tiniest piece of chalk on the sidewalk and wanted to play CHALK! ABBY PAY CHALK!, but the baby was in the house alone, so Bad Mama said “No, we’ll do that later. We have to go back inside.”

The tantrum that followed was the worst three minutes of her life – even worse than a half hour before that, when I shattered all her illustrator dreams with one flying leap while screeching “Eeee! Stop! Abby, no!” as her pudgy hand held a fat crayon over a library book. I could have a lucrative career in acrobatics if this journalism gig I have doesn’t pan out.

Flying tricks aside, these tantrums are filling up a greater percentage of our days than even a few weeks ago. We waver between firmly saying “no” and then stepping back to give her room to tantrum-ize in peace, and just paying the ransom – reading her one more book at bedtime; packing my purse with fruit snacks; letting her wear her sweatshirt outside in July. This is what experts might call weak. Inconsistent. Ineffective.

Yeah, I know. But it’s not like we’re wavering on the important stuff – sunscreen, milk at dinnertime, using her car seat, Rolling Stones over sing-along-songs. We have standards.

Even re-reading that little mailbox scenario now, though, it’s easy to see these tantrums coming and to think her helpfulness is cute, and to think that geez, I just need to be a little creative in my redirecting her attention.

It’s just so much different when you’re IN that tantrum. Sigh.

I walk around at home in search of five- or 10-minute blocks of time to myself. My quest involves a lot of handing a drooling baby back and forth between the two of us when Dave’s home, and praying the cat-napper to whom I gave birth stays asleep long enough for me to use the bathroom. It’s filling my arms with dirty clothes and toys and shoes and sticky, empty cups on my way to the kitchen so I can have an excuse to pour some water into a glass and drink it alone before Abby sees and demands her own sippy cup.

Just. Five minutes. I don’t ask for much.

Dave gets a few hours to himself between 7:30 a.m., when he’s watching “Dinosaur Train” with Abby before we head out the door for the sitter’s, and going to work at his second-shift job around 1. Now, granted he often (he’d argue I meant to say “always”) spends the morning doing my bidding (laundry and sometimes cleaning the bathroom when I ask nicely and wink at him to remind him I really love him and care that he’s also tired and busy, I do care, I really do).

But it’s alone time. And his Facebook status gets updated while laundry’s in the dryer, does it not? I REST MY CASE.

That’s my point – he gets to do these things without someone clinging to his leg – and without feeling like he should be feeling guilty about not playing with that someone clinging to his leg.

So I get to grocery shop alone on Saturdays. And, wow. That’s a treat. Go on, be jealous. What a purely enjoyable way to spend an hour. Exactly what I had in mind.

Right.

So, realizing that wasn’t enough to keep me from weeping beside a rainy windowpane (or whatever it is people do when they have time to mope), I stopped eating lunch by my desk at work, fleeing for the breakroom.

It sounds ridiculous. People have been doing this for decades. But really – I hide in the breakroom that once used to creep me out because of its constant off-smell. I look forward to that smell now, because it means an hour with no babies, no laundry, no errands. No grocery shopping. No clipping coupons. No dog to let outside, wait, he wants back inside, wait, just kidding! outside he goes again, over and over again for an hour.

Spending the break at home would be no break. Any mom can tell you that.

So, forgive me if I, at 1:30 p.m., am already daydreaming about all the reading I can do the next day at 12:30.

Yes, yes, thank you for pointing out how lame that is. But really. You guys – ONE HOUR. It almost makes going back to work worth every tear I shed a few weeks ago. Almost.

Seriously. An hour. Now you can be jealous.