Unicorns. Bigfoot. Sensible Republican policies (hee hee).
These are things that, by and large, do not exist.
On the other hand, baby sleep karma is real. It most certainly exists. How do I know? Because of this little turd dinosaur:
Timehop Abe. He looks cute, but he’s really MEAN.
Timehop Abe is the “mascot” for an iPhone app called Timehop. It looks back at “this day in history.” Abe tells me what I posted on Facebook one year ago today, two years ago today… up to six years ago sometimes.
Because Squeak was born almost exactly two years after Peanut, when I look back at “this day two years ago,” Peanut was the same age then as Squeak is now. Over the past month, I’ve been seeing a couple of disturbing 2012 Facebook posts, including these gems:
“Today I’m thankful for a baby that has slept through the night all week. 7+ hours straight every night!”
“In honor of my first day back at work full-time, Peanut slept 9 hours straight! What a good girl!”
And then there’s this blog post which I wrote when Peanut was 4 months old. An excerpt:
[Peanut] consistently sleeps a minimum of 12 hours, and up to 13 hours, 45 minutes at the longest. Peanut doesn’t take a middle-of-the-night feeding anymore. Those are straight through sleep totals.
Squeak is just a few days away from being four months old. Let’s quickly compare his sleeping habits to hers:
- To date, the longest straight stretch of sleep he’s had is 5 hours and 45 minutes (that means the longest stretch of sleep I have had is about 4-1/2 hours)
- He goes to bed at 8:30pm. (We were putting him down at 8pm but he was consistently waking up at 4am and wouldn’t go back to sleep.)
- He wakes up at least two times, sometimes three, to nurse. Usually around 1-2am, and again around 4-5am.
- For a full week after Daylight Saving Time, he was up 5 to 6 times each night. Yeah that was awesome.
- He wakes up around 8am each day. (This may change when he starts daycare; he’ll have to get up around the same time several days a week, so sleeping in may come to an end.)
My little Squeaker fell asleep during tummy time.
My babies could not be more different in this regard. (The only thing they both do well is go to sleep. I lay Squeak in his crib at bedtime and listen happily as he coos and smiles at the bears gently spinning above him on his mobile. The last two days, Peanut has actually asked to be put down for nap. If nothing else, we have either trained them well or gotten really lucky.)
This mama is exhausted. I haven’t slept more than 4-1/2 hours straight since about… June? Yeah, that sounds right.
When Timehop Abe pops up each day with a new reminder of just how good I had it two years ago, and how bad of a sleeper Squeak is compared to Peanut, I silently cuss the girl who posted those updates. “F**k you…. me from two years ago!”
(I empathize with anyone who was irritated with me back then. As a noob, I didn’t realize just how much of a faux pas it was to brag about a good sleeper. It’s just plain cruel. I’m so sorry!!)
I am constantly tired. I’ve gotten used to it… a little. My body has realized this is the new normal, and it isn’t quite as vicious as it was. I start back to work 5 days a week very soon. Right now I’m working Monday through Thursday, and by Wednesday afternoon, I am exhausted from lack of naps. The naps help me overcome my broken nighttime sleep, and keep me sane. When I’m working, naps go by the wayside. *sad trombone*
So Squeak is a bad sleeper (or maybe just not as good as Peanut). In other ways, he has a leg up on Peanut. He’s the happiest baby, and incredibly smiley. I wouldn’t have described Peanut as unhappy, but now that I’ve met Squeak, I can see that she was a somber baby. He’s so content; we can go to a restaurant and he’ll just chill in his bucket seat, watching the world go by and flashing smiles our way. Peanut would have been screaming two minutes into the appetizer.
I have been tracking Squeak’s sleeping habits, and he is improving. Little by little, sleeping longer during the first stretch of the night. Eventually we’ll get down to one feeding, and maybe sometime before he turns one, we’ll drop it completely.
If he goes far beyond his first birthday, that’s okay by me. This is my last baby, so I’m willing to extend my run as a late-night watering hole a little longer.
In the meantime, I will continue to swear at the dinosaur and hate the younger me who pops up on my Timehop every morning, bragging about her amazingly good sleeping infant.
Who is that bitch? 😉
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