It must be great being able, indeed expected, to sleep during the day. I am trying to type very quietly while J sleeps on the sofa. He did just wake up a minute ago, stood up and then lay back down on his other side. Amazing. I don't think he even realised he was awake.
Baby sleep is a strange thing. You spend half your life imploring them to get their heads down, and the other half trying to keep them awake so that they can sleep at the properly appointed times. Not that they ever do.
Other parents obsess about it almost as much as you do. It is a badge of some honour to have a baby or toddler that 'sleeps well'. Jeez! As if we have anything to do with it. They sleep when and where they like.
J has never been what you would call a great sleeper. When he was younger, he would sleep all day and be awake all night. That's how it seemed anyway. I can vaguely recall pacing the front room in the wee small hours singing Blackbird, Stairway to Heaven or some made up song for hundreds of verses. I actually thought that this would be a great way for me to imprint the lyrics to some of my favourite songs into my memory, which is terrible for such things. What I didn't realise was that at three in the morning, your brain is mainly concerned with ensuring that you don't drop the baby or stop breathing. So my recitations would be like a badly scratched record - sing first two lines of first verse, switch to last two lines of third verse, attempt half of chorus, and repeat from the beginning. Now these addled versions are indelibly imprinted on my mind never to be shifted.
Altogether now... Hello darkness, hello friend...
2 comments:
It's amazing, isn't it, how obsessed you become with your children's (and your own) sleep? I remember reading Gina Ford and wondering with astonishment why EssexSprogGirl wouldn't sleep at Gina's appointed times.
As the months went on and she still wouldn't sleep more than a couple of hours at night, I became increasingly desperate. At one point, I was standing by the side of the road, waiting to cross and thinking, "If I could just get my feet run over by a car, I could go to hospital and get some sleep."
Even now, I marvel at how the children can be so active and yet need so little sleep. Wish I was the same. *Yawn*
Unfortunately we are back to nights of not great sleep as jimbob has a virus of some sort. At the moment it's a bit like a real life version of 'there were three in the bed and the little one said... go and sleep on the sofa bed daddy. Our king-sized bed isn't nearly big enough for you.' Luckily I have trained myself SAS style to survive on only a few hours of sleep a... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
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