Tired but getting there

The girls are doing well. Lately I have heard from a couple of people that babies need to get to 10 pounds, and then they have the strength and capacity to sleep for five hours or more through the night. We must be getting close, because Cecilia and Jessie both seem to me to be in the 10 pound range. I'll have to put them on the scale with me. Evelyn is smaller but looks quite well. Still, she can get quite overwhelmed. A couple of nights in the past week she has woken up screaming with hunger and by the time we have the bottle ready she is so overwhelmed that she can stop screaming long enough to take the bottle. It takes me a lot of interesting juggling and holding and calming to help her get a few pulls of the bottle, then she falls back into screaming. After several cycles of this there is enough milk in her belly, and maybe the repeated experience of calming enough to feed helps too, and she begins to feed in earnest. The whole process took 45 minutes each time, and she needed to be held and patted for a long time after the feeding was over so that she could calm down and sleep. All this at 3 in the morning. What joy! I have visions of doing a very similar dance of reassurance and demand when she is in grade school regarding homework.