One morning last week, I woke up around 6:45 – like I do every morning, fed Dee – like I do every morning, then snuck out of bed leaving my sleeping baby to snuggle with her Daddy for an hour or so while I got the day started…like I do every morning. So imagine my surprise when not ten minutes later, as I was taking my first sip of coffee, I was hit in the face with a flying barf rag. (Mostly dry.) DURING MY SACRED COFFEE RITUAL. (That is caps’d, bolded, underlined, and italicized because if you have ever lived with an infant, than you know how special those quiet coffee sipping morning moments are to me.)
Anyway – the rag had been flung by my husband, who was standing, bleary eyed and bed headed, holding a very awake and alert Dee – his grimace rivaling her grin. Peeling his lips off his teeth in the way that only morning mouth can force you to do, he seethed: “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me.”
Dramatic, right? What I didn’t realize was that Delilah had been up for the previous three hours, and Scott had taken one for the team, closing me in our bedroom alone so I could catch up on zzzzzz’s. She was stirring when I slipped out of bed to make my coffee, and since then, she’d taken to pulling on his lower lip and chattering away. That’s the thing about parenting a newborn together – you are pretty heavily reliant on your partner holding up their end of the bargain if you want a fighting chance at maintaining some sense of sanity. So while a barf-rag to the face might seem like an over reaction, it’s been a long road to figuring out how to ration the sleep in this household [since the arrival of Miss Delilah George] so that nobody loses their marbles.
Scott really loves his sleep. LOVES IT. He’d do it all day long if he could. He loves it so much that before Dee was born I had serious concerns about what would become of him if he couldn’t get all 17 hours of it randomly throughout the day. We had many a conversation about how his sleeping schedule was going to change, and he was going to have to start going to bed earlier and getting up earlier, all in the name of Daddy-hood. He was totally on board.
But then the kid came home. And it’s kind of like all bets are off when you bring your first kid home from the hospital, you know? They don’t know day from night, and if you’re breastfeeding, you are doing it around the freaking clock, so you just do whateverthefuck works for sleeping because you are TIRED, and you’ve been pretty much ripped in two, and people are all up in your business for weeks, and did I mention you are TIRED? So like many parenting pitfalls, the road to sleepless nights is paved with good intentions. Our first nights? Oh, I spent them hovering over Dee’s bassinet (which was LESS THAN A FOOT FROM MY BED, by the way) like a lunatic, shaking, and weeping, and obsessively checking to see if she was still breathing. [I mean, if I went to sleep, who would watch her? You can’t leave a newborn baby ALONE.]
Inevitably, Scott would wake up to find me thisclose to a mental break, he would take our newborn from me, tuck me into bed, and spend the next few hours making sure I couldn’t hear a peep she made so I could catch some Zzzzz’s. But then it was time for Daddy to go back to work. And Mommy still had that glint of insanity in her eye. And we knew that something had to shift, because all three of us were pretty tired and nauseated and tearing our hair out by then (okay, maybe not Dee – I might have been projecting) so we decided to do what we knew would be the least painful for all of us. For the time being, Scott would return to his regular hours as the resident night owl and stay up with Dee, and I would take over when he went to bed around 3. And that worked beautifully. I’d pump before bed, crash out, and then a few hours later he’d give her a bedtime bottle, put her to sleep, and by the time she was stirring for her first nightly wake up I’d have caught a good four hours and be ready to rumble. I’d happily serve my shift throughout the night and when morning arrived and it was time for Dee to get up? Scott would rise, and take Dee to change her, play with her a bit, while I power napped and then he’d wake me to feed her before he left for work. Everyone got at least a four hour stretch a night. I can live on four hours of sleep. Four hours is luxurious. It was heaven.
And then one day, Dee started to get the hang of the whole Day vs. Night thing. And she started to actually sleep more at night than she did during the day. This called for celebration. And for a new sleep schedule. But even though Dee started to sleep during the universally accepted hours of “nighttime” her Daddy didn’t. Because you know the aforementioned Coffee Ritual? Well, Scott has a little thing he likes to call the XBOX 360 Ritual. It’s his special time, and he waits until Dee goes to bed because those crazy combat games are VIOLENT and I don’t want her waking up having nightmares about being in the trenches of World War I (yes, I know that’s INSANE.) So yeah. As Dee went to sleep earlier, Scott just started playing video games later. When Dee would wake up in the middle of the night, I’d find him still on the living room couch all blood-shot eyes and “I FINALLY UNLOCKED THAT ACHIEVEMENT!” and ready to pour his highly decorated commander ass into bed and I’d be the one waging war against heavy eyelids. And then come morning time, when Dee was ready to party and I was ready to keel over from exhaustion, there was no waking Daddy to relieve me, because he was only on hour 3 of his sleep cycle and would have to go to work in a few hours.
Teething. Cold season. Daylight Savings Time. All of those things ate Scott’s XBOX ritual alive before I had to. I’ve heard people say the four month wakeful doesn’t exist. That’s it’s a myth. Those people are welcome to travel back in time and trade lives with me for the month of February. I’m still upset about how little sleep I got. Eventually we had to wise up and team up if we wanted to survive life with an infant. [It’s amazing how parenthood changes you. For years I tried to get my husband to turn off the XBOX and come to bed, and my daughter was able to do it in a matter of weeks.] And as Delilah comes up with new ways to challenge our sanity, we continue to find new ways to adapt, and do our best to keep the barf-rag-flinging to a minimum. We are warriors. We are team mates. And we are exhausted.
[This week/last week has been Guest Blog Week at the brand-spankin’ new Mom-Nom.com, and today I got to wrap things up with the above post. (Thanks to Tiffany for having me.) There are a bunch of pretty great posts up over there right now written by some pretty great folks, like THIS POST from Emily (emmiebee.com) on having three babies in thirteen months (I’ll let you do the math) or THIS ONE from Kenny (smonkyou.com) on being a Dad in a sea of Moms. Check ’em out.]
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