No One Can Tell You...

Okay. So when they tell you while you are pregnant that your days of good sleep are over, you smugly think to yourself, "Surely that will not be the case with me. My baby is going to be a good sleeper." I am willing to bet that 9 out of 10 moms are proven wrong once that baby arrives.

The night Evie arrived, I couldn't sleep because I was just too excited that she was here. It felt odd to me that this little person that had been a part of me for so long, was now laying next to me, all by herself. "What if she's cold? Or lonely?" I thought. At that point, I was still having to wake her to eat, though she quickly started waking up on her own just fine. Over the next few weeks, I got better at sleeping when she slept. She'd wake two or three times in the night for a diaper change and a feed and then go back to sleep.

Then, magically, when she was about 10 weeks old, she started sleeping "through the night." I remember waking that morning at 5 a.m. and thanking the Good Lord for all those hours in a row. She stuck with that pattern for a few weeks, and I thought we were home free. But then the night waking started again. And other than a brief stint after New Year's and the occasional night here or there, she's back to waking up once, twice, sometimes three times a night.

I am tired. I would be tired as a stay at home mom. But I am a full-time working mom and so feel really tired. It sucks to have to get up at 6:30 a.m. (okay most days it's more like 7) after spending what feels like half the night up with the baby. But that is the path I have chosen. And most days I am able to just push through.

And there is really no straight answer on how to get your baby to sleep "through the night." (In fact, medically speaking, "through the night" is considered to be a five hour stretch, so, technically, Evie does that. It's just at the wrong end - usually 7:30 to 12:30 or so.) There are so many "techniques" to get your baby to sleep it is overwhelming, from cosleeping to cry-it-out methods. It's hard to really know what is normal and what you can do that won't scar your child for life! I just have a hard time letting my daughter scream her head off in her crib in the middle of the night (or any time for that matter). But I also don't sleep as soundly when she is in the bed with me. So currently what I do is get up and rock her back to sleep, put her in the crib and tip-toe out of the room.

I guess the point of this little rant is to say that no one can really tell you how hard it is going to be, how exhausting. I'm really just doing the best I can, following my "maternal instincts," as they say, and praying that, one day, I may get a full night's sleep on a fairly regular basis.