NOT sleeping like a baby
I can tell you now the term ‘sleeping like a baby’ was not coined by a mother. As a first time Mum, I’ve discovered that not even babies ‘sleep like babies’. In fact, if anyone tells you they ‘slept like a baby’, my guess is that are childless!
As most mid-thirty something couples who had a good 14 years of total independence under our belts, we swore blue in the face that the baby wouldn’t take the spontaneity out of our lives. I remember thinking vehemently that the baby would just have to ‘fit’ into our lives. We were going to be those cool, relaxed types. Having a baby certainly wasn’t going to stop us going out for dinners, or the odd Tuesday night wine. We just figured that the baby would sleep in the pram…alongside us… in the wine bar (of course). We certainly weren’t going to be ‘those’ precious parents, you know the ones with the crazy strict routines that mean they can’t venture more than 20 meters from their front door. Our baby was just going to be totally cool with noise. No-one was walking on tippy-toes in our house!
Fast forward in time to the sleep-deprived mother of a 10 month old. I can tell you right now that once I’ve got my darling child to sleep, I would cut off someone's toes if it made them walk quieter. When you’ve spent the last 40 minutes of your life rocking, shushing and patting a baby to sleep…then leopard crawled out of the room (avoiding the floorboards that creak), if anyone so much as exhales at an audible pitch, you will have their head. Sounds violent? Don’t even get me started on the meter reading man who always rings the bell just as baby has gone to sleep. A bat out of hell…
You won’t sleep, for like years…
Being a person who needed 10 hours of sleep a night, I knew I was in for a shock. I knew babies were going to wake through the night, but what I didn’t get is that it would be like that for a very, very long time…years in fact. If you count not sleeping in the first and third trimesters because you need the loo/are being kicked and prodded/need to do a three point turn to change sides, plus the 10 months of actually having a baby….I have officially not slept through the night for 1 year now. Based on what I know of 2 & 3 year olds, I still have a good 2 years left of sleeplessness. That’s what I wish someone had told me. We are talking years people. Earlier in the week, I was talking to a guy who didn’t have kids and asked how he liked early mornings. He said he didn’t mind them, almost inferring that there was nothing to complain about. He said that he could easily do a 6 am start if he needed to. I wanted to ask him ‘ how do you feel about getting up at 6am every day for the next 3 years…even on weekends…even on a public holiday…even when you are so sick you can’t move! I just found out that same guy is having twins. I did have a little chuckle.
The thing about ‘sleeping through’…
Mums are always asking each other ‘is your baby sleeping through?’. I’ve since discovered that what that technically means is sleeping for a stretch of 5/6 hours at a time. I mean really? is that enough sleep for anyone. Well, didn’t I think I had the sleeping thing down when my son started sleeping through the night at 9 weeks. I thought life was getting back to normal…the hard bit is over… baby ‘sleeping through the night’ – big tick! Ha! in fact, what I have come to discover is that just because they can sleep through the night – doesn’t mean that they will. In fact, if the room is too hot or too cold, they are sick, they are teething, they have separation anxiety, they like the sound of their cries echoing on the monitor…whatever it is they will wake up and not ‘sleep through’. What I now interpret as ‘sleeping through’ is – does your baby have the capacity to sleep through the night if all conditions are perfect and the stars align?
What’s a weekend again?
I was again reminded of the ignorant bliss of not having children on a recent holiday to my home town. My best friend was staying the night…because she could…because she didn’t have a baby. It was a Thursday night, which coincidentally ended up being a particularly disruptive one with about 4 wake ups. Somewhere between the 1/3/5am wake ups (she witnessed from the comfort of her own bed), it suddenly dawned on her that it was Friday morning. She came rushing into my room in a state of absolute horror and said that she’d just realised that I don’t get a break over the weekend. I just laughed. That’s right my friendy…and you thought working a 9-5 was hard!