Hello Baby, Bye-Bye Sleep
Last weekend, Drew and I were in Texas for our friend Kate’s wedding, hitching a ride from Dallas to Austin with our friends Nick and Emily (you might remember them as the first in our group to have a baby). Nick – who has never had a cup of Starbucks in his life – surprised us all by powering down a Java Chip Frappuccino on the way there. He’d gotten less than 5 hours of sleep the night before, between our late night flight arrival and something called “Dads and Donuts” at his son’s school at 8 am. Which, as best I can guess, consists of mostly unemployed men inhaling an entire row of powdered Hostess Donettes. (For the record, Nick is very much employed)
Despite the 12-ounce caffeine-sugar bomb, Nick and Emily both went down for a nap almost as soon as we got to the hotel. Drew and I, who’d slept till 10 am, quietly slipped out to explore Austin. The next day, when Nick zonked out again before the wedding, it occurred to me that he was in…
Parental Sleep Survival Mode
And I’d have done the same as him, were I in his shoes. Rations are low in those early years and you need to grab after sleeping opportunities like a life raft when they float your way. The average parent loses 400 – 750 hours of sleep in the first year alone. This terrifying article says that although we need a bare minimum of five hours of sleep to function properly (who are you freaks of nature functioning properly on 5 hours?!), most of us need eight. But 67% of all new parents are getting just 3 ¾.
And what’s happening to the sleep deprived? Well…
- Mood swings
- Depression
- Lack of energy or motivation
- Decreased ability to focus
- Headaches
- Increased perception of pain
- Lack of impulse control
- Slowed metabolism
- Hypertension
- Heart disease
- Increased likeliness of arguments and relationship splits
They’re also killing about 1,500 people a year in fatigue-related car accidents. But don’t worry – the Mayo Clinic says a generous five-hour stretch of sleep is “possible” after three months. They also have some fabulous suggestions for creatively taking back your sleep, like:
Set aside social graces. When friends and loved ones visit, don’t offer to be the host. Instead, ask if they could watch the baby while you take a nap.
Seems like a good way to ensure that no one but your mother-in-law ever visits you again, but perhaps that’s just me?
Childfree snoozing
When sleep is that much of a hot commodity for parents, I guess it’s easy to understand why they often talk about the Childfree doing things like languishing in bed on Sundays well past the time at which McDonald’s stops serving breakfast. And while this is sometimes true if we’ve been out late the night before, it’s not like we’re all clocking 10 hours a night, rocking a Blanche Devereaux sleep mask. In fact, I’m fully functional on 7, so I’m mad at myself whenever I go over that – even on the weekends. I don’t want to sleep my life away. There’s work to be done, books to be read, places and friends to be visited. But at the same time, I need to be well-rested enough to enjoy them and do things right.
As Drew likes to remind me every time we take a red-eye back to the Midwest, I am a complete baby (pun intended?) about my sleep. I never sleep more than an hour or two on these flights, sometimes nap a little when we arrive, and then I’m miserable and out of sorts for the rest of the day. I get through it only because I know I can catch up the next night. But if I knew I couldn’t get back on track for another 6 months, and still had to get up every day and be fully mentally present for work? I know parents are fond of saying things like, “you’ll figure out how to survive”, but I’m not sure I understand the point of just surviving. Call me crazy, but I’d rather be thriving.
What about you guys? Can you function on 3 ¾ hours of sleep?
28 Responses to Hello Baby, Bye-Bye Sleep
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“Seems like a good way to ensure that no one but your mother-in-law ever visits you again, but perhaps that’s just me?”
Oh that made me laugh out loud for real!
It’s the most ridiculous piece of advice I’ve ever heard!!!
Let us get back to you on this one in a month or two. zzzzzzzzz……….
Megan, I can’t believe you’re even awake to read this!!!
I can make it through on 3 and a half hours if I need to, but I really can’t imagine having to do that day after day after day. In fact, I’d say that most nights I only get about 5 or 6 hours because I have a rotten time falling asleep and then staying that way. I’ve even managed to be really pretty alert after a night of total insomnia where I just lay there trying to fall asleep. It’s amazing how much rest you can get without actually sleeping. But again, not something I could do for more than a night or two.
It is definitely one of those aspects of parenthood that made me decide I’m better off without kids. Of course, my mother tells the story of how my older brother slept through the night from the first night she brought him home. Then, two and a half years later when she brought me home, I kept waking her up at night. She called the doctor to find out what was wrong with me. He suggested that she probably should have called him to ask what was wrong with my brother instead. We still fill those roles, too. He can sleep anywhere at anytime. I need to have the perfect conditions. Vacations are anything but restful because I can never sleep in a hotel. And forget about naps. They just make me groggy.
Yeah, I’d be a complete mess for the first, say, 7 or 8 years if I ever had a kid.
Yup, I think it’s the accumulation factor, or the “sleep debt” as they call it, that really gets you in the end. I’m sorry you have such a rotten time sleeping even without all those distractions – I went through a phase of that in college, and I do not envy you!
Since my wife has a really hard time sleeping anyway, and has other chronic illness, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to be the one up with our daughter at night. we basically planned for both of us to be as free as possible during the first couple months, because we knew we’d have to be tag-teaming a lot in order for Lindsay to get the rest she needed. I think I was taking just one or two college classes to finish up school, and running my tutoring business a little on the side.
So, for the first month or two, our daughter slept okay, but she was flipped. As in, she’d sleep a lot during the day, and then she’d be awake with me all. night. long. My wife would sometimes wake up to pump or feed her, but mostly my wife slept through the night, and I don’t begrudge her that at all, since she went through nine really tough months and then pushed a bowling ball out of her body. Everything goes better when my wife is healthy.
When I was up with my daughter, it got really strange, because one second I’d be almost crying looking at her and thinking how beautiful she was, and then the next I’d grit my teeth and clench my fingers and shake a little and be like “just. freaking. go. to. sleep. kid.” I’m just glad that I could then hand her over to her mom around 7:00 in the morning and sleep for a while before my classes. Parents that have to do it all on their own because their partner works. . . I have so much compassion for them.
Bottom line, I wouldn’t have functioned well at all on just 3 or 4 hours of sleep. We were lucky to be able to pass our daughter between us, but we also deliberately stripped our budget to ridiculous lows so that we could afford to both be at home for a couple months. and even then, I frankly felt a little crazy during those long nights before we got her sleeping flipped the right way.
Also, whenever I had to commute, we always made sure that THAT night I got a good 8 hours. We were really careful with that.
Very responsible of you!
It’s great that you had the flexibility to be able to take the brunt of the up-all-night nights like that in the beginning. Since Drew has to be up for work around 5 am, I think I’d feel pretty terrible interrupting what little sleep he gets right now. And I imagine most women are in a similar boat.
Man, this is one area of parenting I can’t debate. Yes, you literally sacrifice years of sleeping. Obviously after 2 kids I still think it’s worth it, but there’s no getting around it. Well unless you hire a night nanny (a small fortune I’m sure, but could be worth it) OR adopt a teenager, which would mean you have the opposite problem of trying to get them out of bed everyday. Sleep deprivation has been the cause of many unnecessary fights in our marriage. We would literally fight over who got more minutes of sleep the night before, and whether we caught the other one pretending to sleep through the baby’s cries. But you keep telling each other (and yourself) that one day, they will sleep. And when they finally sleep through the night, you continue to wake up and check to make sure they are okay since they’re not waking up
Yes, I imagine that even after things settle down, your sleep patterns are probably off for years to come because you’ve got a new internal clock. I LOVE that you fight over who was pretending to sleep!!
I find my cat wakes me on a regular basis throughout the night good practice i guess if we do have kids. I know of parents who grap a few hours sleep while their kid is sleeping it makes sense.
Yes, mine is biting my shoulder at 4 am every morning for his Fancy Feast. Luckily, I can just squirt him with water to make him go away…that training technique isn’t really working though.
Great discussion, and very apropros!
I did that through the first 4 yrs of grad school… looking back, it’s barely an existence, nevermind the question of quality of life. Although my spouse can get by on 6 hours easy, I need 8-9 hours to be functional. It’s definitely an age issue for me (don’t know about others): 20s meant more energy and less concern about next day consequences, whereas in my 30s, no sleep = suffering for all the next day. Beyond that, relying on caffeine to wake up is a cycle that took years to break, and really messes with your system well after you’ve quit.
So… what’s the going rate for night nannies these days?
Very true, our college selves were much better equipped to handle operating on just a few hours of sleep. I imagine it just gets harder every year that I wait…
Your posts keep bringing up other questions in my mind.
“Set aside social graces. When friends and loved ones visit, don’t offer to be the host. Instead, ask if they could watch the baby while you take a nap.”
This has been a source of contention between my mother and sister. My sister’s feeling is that family should want to spend time with her children and my mother – honestly – didn’t enjoy raising her own children so, she’d rather grandparent in spurts. I understand both sides and in my typical fashion, am somewhere down the middle. I enjoy spending time with my nieces, but I don’t feel it’s my responsibility to “babysit” whenever my sister wants to go out. I live on the opposite side of the States from them both. However, the first thing out of my sister’s mouth when I mention I’m headed over is, “Oh good. You can babysit.” I never know how to take that. I know she just wants us to spend time together – as do I. However, I start to feel like the free “babysitter”.
FYI – I need my 8 hours of sleep. I’ve always known this would be an issue for me if I had children. My husband is a hard sleeper and although would want to get up and help comfort the kids. Honestly, I don’t think he would physically do it. I am a light sleeper and falls asleep easily, but I need 8 hours or I’m cranky. I would be napping all day long.
Yeah, it’s really hard to know how to take that. She may be assuming your main interest nowadays is in seeing the kids vs. hanging out with her (likely because the kids are HER top priority), so she may think she’s just giving you what you want. But still…it’s quite an assumption!
My sister had a kid and said that ‘never sleeping again’ was b.s. She did fine. The kid was not overly needy, but she did wake up and ‘sleep-eat’ or whatever that means a couple times per night. My sister has had sleeping issues in her past, and DOES NOT understand how her husband can nap longer than their (now) three-year-old. She takes it as a personal offense for some reason. Hmmm…now that this is all out in front of me, perhaps this is the reason why she didn’t think there was a sleep deprivation issue.
As a side note, I need about 9 hours of sleep or I automatically schedule in a nap later in the day. Guess I got our dad’s nappin’ gene.
I suppose it has a lot to do with how quickly you can fall back asleep after an interruption. If the kid is only up a couple of times a night, that may mean you only lose an hour of sleep, or it could mean 4 hours if you don’t fall back asleep right away. Sounds like your sister was one of the lucky ones!
From someone who hasn’t had a full night’s sleep in 3 and a half years, I promise you, the stats are true. And I too, would rather be thriving than just surviving. Fortunately my youngest is about 8 months old, so that means it should only be three years and change until she is old enough that her and her brother can entertain themselves in front of the TV on Saturday mornings while I catch up on some Zzzz’s. 6 years without sleep is totally doable, right? At least people have stopped mistaking me for a teen mom, now that my perpetual state of Zombie-ism has aged me by about ten years. . .
Who knew someone could actually be grateful for the bags under her eyes? Way to find the silver lining!
Yeah, this is a big issue for me. As someone who is, for lack of a less humiliating term, delicate, I’m quite to susceptible to anything. Going without sleep turns me into a complete wreck.
Even as a teen, I’d be the first one to fall asleep on nights out.
When we took in a newborn kitten, she had to be fed every couple of hours. The first week was awful. I woke up dozens of times a night, either to feed her or because I was afraid she would die the second I went to sleep (she was really small). There was one point, while I was preparing her food, that I thought I was going to fall apart. I thought “how can something so small destroy my life?”. It was quite ominous.
Some people can do this, and/or want to. Put me down for neither of those two. I’ll take thriving.
Wow, brought down by a kitten that probably fit in the palm of your hand! I can’t say I wouldn’t have had the same experience.
Lack of sleep was really rough on me, apparently. But, the kitten has become an obnoxious, ungrateful cat, I’m proud to say.
I like to tell her she wasn’t worth it on a daily basis. She doesn’t care. And then she goes back to shredding my furniture.
I’d like to think a baby would do the same thing. They have claws, right?
Good grief, I hope not – childbirth sounds painful enough!
Very good points here.
And what’s with McDonald’s shutting down breakfast so early in the day? I’d love a McGriddle for lunch on a Saturday. And I’m sure a lot of kids and parents would, too. Let’s start a petition. Who’s with me?
Believe me, I’ve tossed around the idea of a McDonald’s franchise that sells breakfast 24 hours a day ad nauseum. I think I’d making a killing in any college town.