Because I Said So
My life as a Mom

Has any cliche made new parents laugh as wryly as the phrase “sleeping like a baby”? That mythical peaceful untroubled sleep…are there any babies who really sleep like that? That is, for more than 4 hours at a time? (There’s some comedian or movie which finished that line with “…I woke up every 2 hours crying for my mother.” It’s funny because it’s true!)

The Pickle goes to sleep easily - for that I’m thankful - but oh dear lord do I ever wish he’d stay asleep easily too! I haven’t slept more than 5 continuous hours in 6 months, and it’s seriously starting to take its toll.

If this article on sleep is accurate, I’ve regressed cognitively to approximately the level of a 3 year-old by now. Which I’m thinking makes me unqualified to care for a 6-month old, let alone hold down a full time job. Ah, well.

I’m not sure if it’s in the sleep article I linked to or not (I’m too tired to read anything that long), but there was a study done which compared the effects of sleep deprivation on people who were kept awake for 24 hours straight (making them about 8 hours sleep deprived) and people who were deprived of 1 hour of sleep a night over a period of 8 nights. Both groups were equally impaired in cognitive tests - slower reflexes, memory problems, etc. The only difference was that the people who’d been shorted on 1 hour of sleep per night didn’t know they were impaired because their bodies had adjusted to the new schedule and they didn’t feel sleepy. I’ve been deprived of approximately 3 hours of sleep per night for the past 6 months. Pretty scary, huh?

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m absolutely hopeless when it comes to sleep training. Maybe because DH and I are already very much co-equals as parents, I just don’t feel up to the “night-wean by making Daddy wake up with the baby instead” school of thought. He already wakes up with the baby half the night, and why should I be entitled to more sleep than he is? And I can’t bear to let the Pickle cry, especially when it’s so easy to just go in there and nurse him back to sleep. And don’t babies go through a growth spurt at 26 weeks? Why should I night-wean him now, when he’s probably genuinely hungry?

The other thing is, in a small apartment like ours, DH taking all the night wakings still wouldn’t really let me sleep - it’s not like the wall between our bedrooms is soundproof. See above, re: so much easier to just go in there and nurse him. It only takes a few minutes and then I can go back to sleep and nobody has to lie awake listening to the baby cry because Mommy doesn’t want to wake up at fuck-o-clock in the morning to feed him. Again.

Currently, DH is on Baby Nighttime Duty until 2am, and then it switches to me. Pickle normally goes to bed at 7, wakes up to eat (2-4 oz of formula) around midnight, wakes up again for me around 3 and 5. Or 2 and 4. Or (on good days) 4 and 6. We tried switching shifts for a few nights to see if nursing him at midnight instead of giving him a bottle would make him sleep longer, but it didn’t seem to work, and it kind of made us crazy to switch up our own sleep schedules like that. So we’re back to the old system now. It’s enough to keep us functioning.

For a while, I tried nursing him at 10 right before I went to bed, in the hopes that he’d skip his midnight waking. Unfortunately he didn’t skip the waking altogether, just moved it to 2 instead of 12, and then woke up as usual at 3:30 and 5am anyway. And given the choice, 12 is a much better time for him to wake up than 2, so I stopped doing it.

I suspect it will be a long long time before my little Pickle sleeps through the night on his own. But oh, when that day comes! That happy happy day! I’ll throw a party and invite everyone I know. They can watch the baby while I nap.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Sleep. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.