Sleep Depravity

This week has been the first week where nothing extraordinary happened – other than the Jax actually being here. There were no emergency room visits, no pediatric appointments – just life with our son and three cats. This is the first time in six weeks that we were able to have some semblance of predictability or normalcy. This doesn’t mean that anything is easier – on the contrary – the doldrums are physically demanding, overwhelming to think about. While we are much more comfortable with Jaxon and have metaphorically gone through the birthing process of parenthood, each day revolves around the whims of a 5.5 lbs infant who doesn’t really know what he wants.

The most important thing, other than keeping our child safe and alive, is just getting enough sleep. Actually, these are related because what good are Lara and I if we go insane due to sleep deprivation? According to a study, new parents get less than 5 hours of sleep each night during the first year of a baby’s life. I’m happy to report that we are winning if by winning you mean sleeping less than five hours. The study also found 23 percent of those polled believe the lost sleep in their child’s first year at home led them to behave “slightly unusually.” This includes 11 percent hallucinating something which wasn’t really there, and 44 percent have completely forgotten what they were saying mid-sentence. I can say that I’ve suffered from both of these outcomes as this past overnight, I thought I heard music or speaking. Good times.

This gets us to typical night with Jaxon. Early in the parent birthing process, that time when everything is new with an infant, I had the exited energy of everything – the adrenaline kept me moving and doing what needed to be done. If I felt compelled to drop in on a work meeting at 9am, I could actually get up and do that on a couple and a half hours of sleep and be somewhat coherent. This all isn’t so hard. Now, Lara and I have fallen in to a care pattern that makes that indulgence almost impossible.

Lara and I are practicing “platoon sleeping”. Basically, we go to war against the baby with the prize being sleep. The national best selling book, “The Birth Partner“, provides a method where one parent cares for the baby late night and the other gets up early morning . In theory, as the book states, each parent gets a stretch of uninterrupted sleep, with several hours of intermittent sleep. It would be great if that happened.

At around 10pm, Lara takes care of the house and the baby while I get three to four hours of rest. Rest should not be confused with sleep, where I am fully unconscious and in recuperative REM. No, it isn’t that. It’s a haze of baby cries and random thoughts. I typically hear Jaxon and Lara arguing during diaper changes and feedings, reminiscent of the fights between our new Capeside friends Dawson Leery and Joey Potter.

Typically as soon as something like arrives, Lara and I change shifts. Around 1 or 2am, I take over the baby care duties. Theoretically, this should mean the occasional rocking Jax as he sleeps in his bassinet and feeding him overnight. It would be great if that happened, I sure it happens on television, just not in this house. Each night is a negotiation where Jax and I work through the requirements of what it will take for him to sleep for at least two hours. He ignores this request and poops most of the time. Still, we strive to give peace a chance.

After changing, which is like shaving the hair off of an angry, wet cat, I do what I can to get him to 3am. The 3am hour also coincides with Lara’s pumping schedule. Oh? You thought she was down for the night? Not a chance. If she doesn’t do this, her breast will literally explode – those are her words or how I heard them. This 3am is the hump point of the night where I can extend the bottle feed as long and possible – a war of attrition – if you will. During this time, I catch up on YouTube videos about computing or the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sometimes I get into twitter discussions that have ended or have yet to begin. Sometimes I play a phone-based computer game called Gardenscapes because it’s 2021. I also feed and burp the baby, generally. Making Jax work to be fed ensures that he doesn’t get too comfortable drinking from the hose of a bottle and, in theory, tires him out. Now I’m sure some of you consider this to be cruel to plan to make a baby work so hard, perhaps for an hour, to be feed. Understand that he would do this to us if he could master motor control.

If I can get to 4am, the 15 or so minute burping process should manifest in maybe 45 minutes of sleep between 4am and 5am. Most of the time, he shorts and grunts at use like an angry pony, which is cute but not easy to sleep with as you can see in the above video. At 5am, Lara and I negotiate how we get making it to daylight at around 7am. Naturally, I want to sleep – rather my body wants to sleep. My brain wants to give Lara as much sleep as possible. If I can get to 6:30 or 7am, that gives her around 5 hours of rest – not necessarily sleep. Once I get to 7am-ish I can sleep for about 3 hours, missing that weekly 9am meeting I thought I could attend.

Getting back to the Birth Partner book, I think the major problem with it is that it assumes that you can negotiate with terrorists. Jax is a wonderful baby but he doesn’t really give a damn about getting with the program or any program. If he were a television baby, you know, one that makes no noise and sleeps 23 hours a day, sure, this book would be great. We don’t have that baby. He wants what he wants when he wants it. Even if he doesn’t know what he wants, he wants it. we have tried everything to get him down: walking, bouncing, swaddling, singing, feeding, renegade, skin-to-skin, begging etc. Good to know that Lara and I have done all we could and still lost.

The book also assumes that other people are around to do things during the day, the the house magically cleans itself and that the cats cook breakfast and poop in the toilet. I don’t mean to harp on this but COVID has change the game. having a premature kiddo changes the game. Jaxon having, the combined type A yet passive aggressive disposition of his parents changes the game. In fact, there is no game. The goal for Lara and I to get though it without yanking out our individual eyeballs.

Thanks for listening.