Everyone knows that new parents don’t get much sleep. Babies sleep in short bursts (or not at all) and need constant feeding, changing, and comforting. No matter how many books, blogs, experts, or friends an expectant parent consults, nothing can prepare him or her for the reality that is sleep deprivation.
I’m going to be the first to admit that I didn’t like the newborn phase. A lot of you will tell me that you loved it and you love babies. Did your baby sleep? Because mine didn’t, and I hated being so completely exhausted all the time. I felt like I had a new job that was 24/7 (which I did). That was fine for about a month, but then the deprivation started to take its toll.
I remember at one point, Baby Galen must have been three or four months old, getting up in the middle of the night to answer her cries and thinking, I need to go to a hotel. I can’t get any sleep in this place. My brain had forgotten I had a baby and was operating on escape mode.
Baby Galen just a few hours old. I should have been sleeping, not taking pictures.
Another time I was sitting up with Baby Galen in the middle of the night, rocking her back to sleep, and through the walls I could hear Ultimate Sportsfan snoring. I had to make a concerted effort not to get up, grab a pillow, and smother him.
Here’s the good news for all of you new parents. Your child will sleep. Someday. He or she may sleep at five weeks. Or it may take eighteen months or five years. Some day you will get to sleep through the night again.
But here’s another truth: you are never going to get as much sleep as you did before you were a parent.
You know what inspired this blog? One morning I was up at about 5 a.m. working and I saw a post from fellow PBK mom Emily on Facebook. She was also up working and posted that she had no idea how much sleep she would give up before she had kids. I could so relate. I still can because I’m writing this at nine p.m., and I’ll be up before five to get back to work. Why do I do this? Why not hire a baby sitter, stick Baby Galen in front of the TV all day, or put her in daycare full time? Because here’s the last truth: childhood is short.
I once heard a teacher say of childhood, It’s the longest hours and the shortest days. I can’t get this special time with my daughter back. I’m lucky enough to be able to work from home. That doesn’t mean I don’t make sacrifices, and sleep is just one of many. But I know it will be worth it in the end.
Tell me your sleep stories. Did your baby sleep through the night at two weeks? Not until 3 years? How do you manage to fit sleep in now?
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Shana Galen, Multitasker Mama
I’m Shana G
alen, AKA Multitasker Mama (and aren’t we all?). I’m a wife, mom to a two-year-old daughter I call Baby Galen. My parenting motto is, “Keep moving. Don’t pass out. Don’t throw up.” Or maybe that’s my fitness motto? www.shanagalen.com
Ah hell, I could write my own blog on this.
Well, our situation is a little different as we didn’t get a newborn. But we did get an infant who wasn’t sleeping through the night. The Professor and I weren’t really prepared. I’d spent so much time mentally preparing for the older one because I knew she’d have the bulk of the emotional issues to wade through, I hadn’t even considered lack of sleep. It took several months for The Professor to talk me into it, but I finally succumbed and we did a modified cry-it-ou method when she was about 11 months old. The first night she only cried about half an hour (on & off), the second night only about 10 minutes and that was it. She’s been a great sleeper since then.
Except for nap time, my mom (who lives 3 doors away) would come up and while I would put Busybee down for her nap, she’d rock Babybee for hers. The only problem, for whatever reason I couldn’t put her down, at least not in her crib. So if my mom was out of town or had an appointment, I did my best and that usually meant a quick nap of her sleeping next to me on the couch. She just wouldn’t go down for me. I was totally stressed b/c nap time is supposed to be my writing time and it was never guaranteed I would get it. Then in January of this year after some particularly bad patches over the holidays with her naps, I decided, she’s 18 months old, I can simply explain it to her. Which is what I did. One morning i told her she was such a big girl going to bed at night by herself, she was going to start doing the same for her nap. Again it took about 2 days, but now she’s a fantastic napper and will actually even ask for her “night night”.
Robyn, I remember rocking Baby Galen at nap time until she was about 4 months. She would not sleep unless I was holding her. Then I tried swaddling again, and even though it had not worked before, it started working. We did CIO at 4 months, and it worked, in that she was up less frequently and sometimes not at all. I’m so glad I had a video monitor when we did CIO. I was so glad I could see her when she was crying to make sure it wasn’t because her leg was stuck in the crib or something.
Four hours. That’s what I remember. I could get about 4 hours of sleep if I rigidly stuck to HER schedule. Of course, when she nodded off, I wanted to live, eat, talk, read. I had to teach myself that it was either life or sleep.
She didn’t make it through the night until solid food at about 10 months. Even then, I woke up when she didn’t. Hmmm…so who was training who?
Pamela, I wondered about who was being trained too because even after Baby Galen slept through the night, I couldn’t sleep! I was still up every few hours. It took me 6 more months to get back to normal.
The newborn phase was really easy for me. It’s the only time I ever considered my constant insomnia a blessing instead of a curse. I’ve always been a light sleeper and a disjointed sleeper, so getting up frequently didn’t really bother me. My daughter just turned 10 and it’s very true, childhood is fleeting, and although I’ve been a working mom since the beginning, I make the most of the time we do get to spend together.
Kris, I actually know several people who didn’t mind getting up. They are people who don’t need a lot of sleep already. I get considerably less than I did pre-baby, but my body is not happy about it.
I had preemie twins, so sleep was in very short supply at first. They had to eat every 2 hours in order to put on weight. Crying caused them to lose weight and sapped their energy to eat, so we had to anticipate their needs. Pumping, trying to get them to nurse (never happened), giving them bottled breast milk, diapering, etc. — every 2 hours for 2 babies — we were running on negative time. When the kids were about 8 weeks old, my parents came to visit and figured they’d help us out by taking a night feeding. They walked into the nursery, and my husband & I were each holding a baby and having an absolutely nonsensical conversation with each other. We were so sleep-deprived, we were incoherent, but didn’t seem to even notice it in each other.
It did get much better, though. Once they put on some weight and could go longer between feedings, they both decided to start sleeping through on the same night and were good sleepers from then on. If anything, we had the opposite concern — they didn’t give up their last nap until a couple days before they started full-day kindergarten, and we worried they’d fall asleep in school!
Leigh, I do not know how people do it with twins. My husband’s cousin’s wife had triplets a week after me, and I often thought of her when I was feeling sorry for myself and realized it could be a lot worse. One can only hope Baby G naps until she goes to Kindergarten!
Oh, I’m there with you on the newborn phase. Anytime someone talks about how much they enjoyed that phase, I always ask them if they had a sleeper. My kidlet had an undiagnosed (for first 8 weeks) milk and soy allergy, so that meant anytime I had anything with either, it went into the breast milk and gave him terrible stomach aches, so for two months, none of us slept.
But even after figuring that part out, he’s never been a sleeper. LIke kids who fall asleep randomly in their car seat or something? Never. The one time it happened, he was sick. He gave up naps at 18 months and even before that, I’d have to rock him for like an hour to even get him to sleep for half and hour. And if he did nap, that meant he’d fight sleep at night and not go to sleep until like 11pm. It was miserable.
But you’re right, it will get better at some point. Finally at 4, he’s sleeping consistently through the night. And 95% of the time if he wakes up in the night, he goes back to sleep without getting us up. The only exception is nightmares.
But I think the sleep thing is one of the reasons we decided pretty early on that we were totally good with only one child, lol.
Roni, it really does make a difference in how much you enjoy the infant stage. I am always so shocked by people who had difficult babies and then have another child later. I guess they are more optimistic than I am. Baby G was the same as kidlet in that after she was like 3 weeks old, she never went to sleep in the car or her stroller or anytime without a lot of effort on my part. I almost wished it was some sort of allergy at the time because then I would understand what she was screaming about. I was never so happy as when she learned to talk.
I’m with you, Shana! I LOATHED the newborn phase! The first two months he was up every two hours…then the rest of the year he was plagued with constant ear infections which had him screaming all night long. He’s ten now and a lot more pleasant company. However, he seems to have inherited my insomnia.
Oh, Brooklyn, ear infections are the worst! You don’t know what’s wrong, and if they don’t have a fever with it, you don’t even realize they are sick. At least you and the ten-year-old can keep each other company!
I didn’t sleep, through the night, until my daughter was seven. I am a lighter sleeper anyway, so the slightest sound still wakes me up. I certainly wasn’t prepared for the sleep deprivation. She was not a napper, and still seldom naps. I am not a napper, so even when I had the opportunity to sleep, I never caught up.
Gayle, I don’t know how you did it. I would have gone insane with so little sleep for so many years (not that I get oh-so-much now). I ended up taking my doctor’s advice and taking OTC melatonin to get my sleep cycle back on track. It really worked, and I haven’t had to take it for months now.
Oh, sleep deprivation. It seems to have become a way of life around here…and I don’t say that with pride at all, lol. Just a few months ago we were having issues with SuperGirl being afraid to sleep because of a windstorm, and now WonderGirl has been waking up 4-5 times+ per night for the past few weeks. Fortunately, I work until very late in the morning, so I’m usually up anyway when they wake up, but when I go to sleep at 3am and then they get up at 3:30, 4:30, etc. and I hardly ever get one night of uninterrupted sleep (even for 5-6 hours)…yeah, it takes a toll. I’ve been saying for the past few months that if we ever have another child, we’ll adopt one who’s potty-trained, sleeps through the night, and doesn’t scream at me all the time, lol. But I think that might mean I’ll need to adopt an adult. =) (And by the way, that pic of Baby Galen is SO ADORABLE. NOW I have teh bebe fever again. *sigh* =)
Elise, it is going to get better. Those girls are going to sleep through the night at one point. But maybe you should give yourself a year of uninterrupted sleep before you have another baby. You must have it bad if Baby G looks adorable in that picture. I think she looks like an alien. But you could not have convinced me she wasn’t the most beautiful baby ever when I first saw her.