My SD Moms While my pregnant self had entertained the thought that baby number two would be my “easy” baby, my “sleeper” baby, I regret to say, I was wrong. “I know how to swaddle!” I thought. “I
know The Happiest Baby techniques!” “I know about white noise and overstimulation. We’ve totally got this!” BAH… HA.
The only thing I’ve got is an 8-month-old kid who never sleeps. Not swaddled or wrapped, not in his “last resort” car seat or even in a stroller. I have the kid who watches absolutely everything and lifts his head up to look around when a floorboard creaks, even if he’s been up for hours on end.
I’ve got the kid who can fight sleep like no one I’ve ever met in my entire life, conk out for 10 minutes, then party all night. I’ve got the kid who wakes up screaming the second a nip slips out of his mouth or his body touches something that lacks a pulse. Having gone through an intense period of sleep deprivation with this child, I now know how important sleep is. Sleep can seriously make or break you. Not sleeping for months on end can tear your life apart and leave it like that crap in the bottom of a hamster’s cage: shredded.
Here are the fifty stages of sleep deprivation as I know them:
- You start taking your kid to school without your bra on, regardless of the fact that your breasts are literally everywhere.
- Showering becomes either obsolete or the only thing you do in your day that brings you back from the brink. Until everyone starts screaming and you realize it was completely not worth it.
- Everything your husband does annoys you.
- Everything your husband doesn’t do annoys you.
- You begin to understand how horses sleep standing up.
- Falling asleep on the toilet seems like a very legitimate option. Until, again,
