Showing Up

This is a mythical creature, which people — most notably people whose children are long married — will claim to have met, and will even claim can be commonly found.

Those people are lying.

We named our son Eliyahu on the Vilna Gaon’s yahrtzeit. Like his illustrious namesake, our son slept no more than 30 minutes consecutively, though his obsession with obtaining nourishment was more temporal than the concerns of the original Rabbeinu Eliyahu.

It was around the three-week mark that my husband, usually a well-informed father, discovered to his horror that intervals between feeds are counted from the beginning, not the end, of a feeding.

And so, because we were desperate for some shut-eye, Lydia entered our lives. She came well-recommended, and with a no-nonsense air that made it clear she wouldn’t stand for Eliyahu’s two a.m. shenanigans.