Tales from the Crib

We are a family of sleepers. I love my sleep...I mean LOOOOVE my sleep. If I don't get a good night's rest, I'm not totally human. I'm an expert napper too. With both of my pregnancies--especially in the first and third trimesters--I took at least an hour-long nap every afternoon. One of my favorite times of the day is bedtime. I love a long shower, curling up with my book for a few minutes then switching off the light and falling soundly asleep. I'm not a deep sleeper really, but I do talk in my sleep often (much to Kevin's amusement) and sometimes wake him up in a daze of half-sleep, instructing him to "GET OUT OF BED...THERE ARE SPIDERS IN OUR BED!". Kevin probably doesn't crave sleep as much as I do--he's much more task-driven and sees every hour of the day as a chance to learn something new or work toward bettering himself (blah. yawn. whatever.) so he often likes to stay up late tinkering on the computer or making music. Once he is in bed though, he's usually dead-to-the-world and (conveniently) rarely hears the things that go bump in the night...or the babies that cry in the middle of the night.

We were blessed with a good sleeper in Anna. She slept through the night at around 2 months old. I remember it vividly: Up until this one particular night, she'd been still waking up a couple of times a night to feed. So, one morning, we woke up at a normal, morning hour...say 6:30am. I turned to Kevin and said, "So, I guess you got up with Anna last night?". He said, "No, I thought you got up with her". At which point we both panicked and scrambled to her room, fully expecting to see that something tragic had befallen our wee baby girl. She was sleeping blissfully. Ever since that night, it's a really, really rare occurrence for her to wake in the middle of the night. She's a champion sleeper. She used to regularly sleep for 12-14 hours a night, plus a two-hour-ish nap. These days, she sleeps about 11 hours a night and still takes a solid 1.5 to 2 hour nap every day. We all get along really well in this house.

So, you can imagine my worry when, as I was pregnant with Jack, people would tell me over and over, "Well, you've got one good sleeper--there's no way that you'll get another good sleeper". Then, in those first weeks of having Jack at home, when we were up every two hours and dealt with some colic at midnight every night...I was, to say the least, downtrodden. It was a rough few weeks for us. Compounding the lack of sleep was knowing that at 7:30am every day, Anna would wake up, well-rested and ready to begin her active little day, despite her mother being severely sleep-deprived and mad at the world.

Now, I know that 1 week of good infant sleep is a far cry from declaring complete and total sleep domination, but Jack has been typically going to bed between 9pm and 10pm and sleeping straight through (in his own crib, in his own room) until 4am-ish every morning. When he wakes at 4am, he usually eats a little then goes back to sleep until 7am or so. He also has been taking at least a 2 hour long nap most days as well. I might be overly optimistic here, but this, my dear readers, is very do-able, as far as I'm concerned. I know that it might not always be this way, but for now, the fact that I'm getting more than about 4 hours of sleep a night has left me feeling like a new woman--like maybe I really can conquer the day...or at least face it without tripping over the bags under my eyes.