4 o’ clock: My baby is home, having succumbed at last to a nap in the stroller while her father took the dog to the park. Her cold, rosy cheeks smell of milk and snow.

10 o’ clock: This is my fourth visit upstairs since Ada went to bed at 7. (Mr. G and I have been taking turns.) It’s the first night we’ve put her to bed unswaddled since she was born and it isn’t going very well, but we can’t keep swaddling her forever and I’ve begun to suspect that she isn’t napping well in part because she hasn’t learned how not to wake up when her arms get capricious. She’s calling for me now, and I’m beating back the lapping edge of frustration with admiration of her effort to use consonants. Only in the past few days has she begun to mimic the patterns of English by punctuating her usual siren of vowels with bleary consonant sounds, and it pleases me that she’s giving it her best shot even in her distress. Not that she doesn’t have a weapons-grade angry howl — she’s been unleashing it upon confinement to her car seat this week — but she isn’t angry now. She’s just bewildered and exhausted. “Ah-byah-vdah-vdah-vdah-vdahv!” she explains tearfully, presenting me with all her arms and legs. What am I supposed to do with these? When I lean into the crib, she buries her little fists in my hair and pulls me close to mouth my cheek. I stroke her face, hold her hands, and she’s asleep again in a minute.

3 o’ clock: This is a long night. Ada is in bed with me, carefully bolstered against rolling; Mr. G made his own bed on the couch — I’ll stick it out with her until 5:30 or 6 and then sleep for a few hours before he has to go to work. She is twisted half to her side, back arched, arms outstretched. Those mutinous limbs have woken her every half-hour or so. I’ve stopped counting the times I’ve nursed her back to sleep or given her my little finger to suckle. (Partial night-weaning is officially on hold for a few days. We’ll take one thing at a time.)

5 o’ clock: Holding one of her hands is working fairly well to keep her asleep, but my arm is tingling in this awkward posture. I am numbering the new things my daughter has encountered in the past day or two: the taste of carrots, the light and color of a slideshow projected on the wall at a party, the alphabet song I sang for her this afternoon, the plush fur of the Corgi pup at our neighbors’ house, the heady power of sitting up in the bathtub to smack at the surface of the water, the knack of tapping the tongue to the alveolar ridge to say “da.” The work her infant brain is doing to consolidate these experiences is staggering. This is why I’m anticipating her movements to guard her sleep. I am thinking of my mother and her mother and all the mothers keeping the night vigil over their babes. I am thinking of mothers in Christchurch camping in broken houses and of mothers in Libya sheltering their little ones from violence, giving thanks that only her own healthy movements are waking my child tonight. In the cocoon of my warm bed, I am wondering whether the snow has begun.