Sarah’s maternity leave comes to an official end tomorrow, with her return to work. She’ll be working Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for a few weeks while we resolve our childcare situation and work out details with Sarah’s mom regarding watching the boy.

We have decided to split overnight “Oliver duties” on the nights before Sarah works. We did a test run last night, and my end of the deal was quite raw. If it’s like this every night, I could return to my “zombified” and cranky employee status of a few weeks ago.

To start, Oliver is not sleeping through the night yet. We had a breakthrough a few weeks ago, but it was short lived. He’s been eating every three or four hours, 24-7.

Last night, we set up his new FisherPrice monitoring deviced (the Sony ones we had been using made terribly hissing and popping noises) and put him to bed around 10 p.m. Around 2 p.m., we could hear him crying and the receiver for the monitor was flashing red lights (the louder Oliver is, the more lights that flash). Our room lit up like a police crime scene. It was obnoxious.

I agreed to take the first shift, so I went down stairs, warmed some milk for a bottle and went to Oliver’s room. It took about 30 minutes to feed him, burp him a few times and rock him back to sleep. I hit our king-size bed around 2:30 a.m. I had a million thoughts in my head and my heart rate was up pretty good due to walking around and flipping lights on and off. I must have been in bed a full hour before I decided to get up. I went into the computer room and played an old Nintendo game for over an hour. Then I went downstairs and had a bowl of cereal and played with the dog. Molly wanted none of me, giving me a “please just let me sleep” look.

Finally tired, I went upstairs around 5:30 a.m. I heard Oliver screaming as I turned to enter our room. Sarah was getting out of bed for her feeding shift. I threw my Springfield Cardinals baseball cap over the monitor receiver to block the flashing lights and went to sleep. Was up for good around 8 a.m. What a night.

I’m sure it was equally rough for Sarah, who’s really upset that her three-month maternity leave is coming to an end. I told her I could return to my roots (as Jen and Kristine suggested a while back) and move to a more affordable house in Florissant so she could stay home full time, but Sarah wants nothing to do with my old ‘hood. Guess we’ll just see how it goes. I’m sure I’ll post something in a few days to let you all know. In the meantime, keep Sarah in your thoughts.