Finally got the baby on a schedule? Good for you! Don’t get comfortable.
There lurks on the horizon something called “sleep regression” which is pretty much what it sounds like. Basically, for various developmental reasons, babies will spit in the face of the progress you’ve made in getting her to just sleep at regular intervals of time so that you can do the same and begin to have some semblence of a normal life. For me, I didn’t care if she kept strange hours, just as long as they were hours I could sleep too. But that wasn’t what I got.
Here was the first real taste of the difficulty of the Second Child. If it weren’t for my older child’s schedule, I could sleep whenever my baby did. But I had to be awake to take her big sister to school and pick her up and, you know, parent her while she was home and awake. To the best of my ability anyway which, during this time, wasn’t great. Homework went undone and meals were not the most nutritious things. Even worse, my nerves were shot and my temper was uncharacteristically short. There was little I could do about it.
They say sleep regression occurs at 4 months or 6 months or 8 months- but those early chances for it were missed because my baby did not conform to a sleep schedule at all. NOT. AT. ALL. (Whenever I tell that to people, there is some uncontrollable shrill laughter that falls out of my mouth along with the words. ) No, not until about 12 months in, was there …I don’t want to call it a “schedule” because it was really more of a “likelihood“. We could kind of guess when her sleep and waking times were and we’d usually be right. There were off nights and days, but it was much, much better.
This was around the time I started noticing that I really wasn’t getting better. I felt terrible. Just really unhealthy and my brain was like pudding. I thought getting myself back to sleeping like a human would make me feel more like one, but the damage was done. Sleep deprivation has some very real side effects, but I was hopeful that eventually I’d recover. Around the 18 month mark, I was starting to feel better. Then it started again:
Captains log
June 23, 2015
“We have been losing the war against sleep regression for a month or so now. The petit Viking Child has never been a super great sleeper, but we had about 6 months of predictability before she started waking up at least once in the middle of the night and every morning between 5:20 and 6:40. Which means *I* also wake up at that time. And I don’t get her two naps a day.
In recent weeks I have broken glasses, dropped large containers of food inside the fridge, left a perfect line of my car’s paint along the wall of my driveway taking Violet to school, oh, and a couple of days ago I went to move a pan I was actively cooking on with my bare hand. Not grabbing the handle, no, the fucking pan itself. Twice, I did that TWICE.”
Sleep regression in your child is often sleep deprivation for you. If you don’t feel like actually reading this article about how truly awful not sleeping is for you there is this helpful iconographic in there to look at, because if you are suffering from sleep deprivation, pictures and short sentences are probably all you can handle.
