Question: What do gondolas and truffles have in common with perusing and sleeping through the night?
Answer: The words (ok, phrase in one case) have multiple meanings that can’t be easily distinguished through context.
- I rode a gondola. Great, was it a boat or a compartment suspended on a high wire?
- I ate a truffle. Okay, was it a mushroom or a chocolate someone thought looked kind of like a mushroom?
- I perused this article. Wait, does that mean you read it thoroughly or you skimmed it or… both? Please strike this word from your vocabulary because directly conflicting meanings are not okay!
- My baby slept through the night. This popular phrase is meaningless on its own. Many sleep books define it differently based on the baby’s age and often as about six hours or something like the time between midnight and five a.m. When regular people say it, I think it usually mean a chunk of time that is long enough and at the right time for the adult(s) to sleep a nearly normal amount, but that’s the whole problem, I can’t tell what they mean unless they lay it out in detail because “sleep through night” is so vague.
All of this is to say that Dd has been in a good sleep stage lately where 2-3 times per week he has slept an 8-9 hour stretch from about 8 pm to 5 am. We quite appreciate it, though since he’s still in our room we wake up when he cries out suddenly (and briefly) between sleep cycles, while slowly rotating himself like snuffling sundial around the crib.
