Who Needs Sleep?

“Who needs sleep?
well you're never gonna get it
Who needs sleep?
tell me what's that for
Who needs sleep?
be happy with what you're getting
There's a guy who's been awake
since the Second World War”

Who Needs Sleep, Barenaked Ladies, from the album “Stunt”

Yesterday, we slept in. Well, we slept longer than we would normally when waking up with Daigoro, whose usual waking time is 6:30 to 6:45 at the moment. I ended up getting up at 7:45. Sleeping in is a luxury that I think childless people don’t generally appreciate. I know I didn’t. Other luxuries you might not appreciate as a toddler-free adult: being able to concentrate on a task on the computer or on your desk without a small 13 kg human plunking him or herself in your lap; being able to leave scissors, markers, medicine and cleaning products anywhere you like; being able to just go out and do something outside the house without a) finding someone to take care of said toddler or b) going through the 10-15 minute ritual of preparing to go outside the house.

We owed the luxury of a morning of extra sleep (my internal clock currently has a unfortunate habit of waking me up at 6:30 even if I want to sleep in, so I currently wake up, go back to sleep, and wake up again a few hours later on these occasions) to the generous offer of my parents to take Daigoro for an evening and the following morning.

Prospective parents, if there is no other reason that you can think of to keep up good relations with your own parents and/or in-laws, this is one you should keep in mind: you will need a break from your child from time to time.

So, thanks to my parents, we had a toddler-free evening and morning. Yay, parents!

Everyone needs different amounts of sleep. I can get by fairly well on about six hours, but I prefer eight. Quality of sleep is important too; I’d rather have six hours of solid, uninterrupted sleep rather than eight hours with one or two episodes of wakefulness. My wife, who has decided to adopt the pseudonym “Marli” for now (it’s a literary reference – more on that later), prefers to have more.

So it came as a bit of a blow to both of us in the weeks and months following Daigoro’s birth that we’d be waking up two or three times in a night. Not that we didn’t expect it, mind you, but expecting and experiencing are two different things. This made for a very unpleasant time for both of us, more so for Marli than for me, since Daigoro was exclusively breast-fed. When he was quite young, Daigoro slept in a basinet in the same room with us. Every so often we’d co-sleep (for the non-parents “have the baby sleep in the bed with the parents”) which was easier in terms of getting the baby to the breast, but harder in terms of space in the bed. Even in a queen-sized bed, a baby can be tricky to accommodate.

I valiantly offered to sleep in the room for as long as I could as a show of solidarity, but Marli quickly pointed out that it was pointless for both parents to be poorly rested just for the purposes of moral support (I was working), so she suggested I sleep on the sofa. I took up the offer guiltily, but not without some relief. If there are some aspects of “hellishness” to parenting, certainly months of sleepless nights range into that territory. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Eraserhead” by David Lynch, the nightmarish wailing of the grotesque “child” in that film comes deliriously close to reality after waking up three or four times in the night for the seventh consecutive night.

Ray Bradbury, one of my favourite science-fiction/fantasy writers, once lyrically described 3 AM as the “midnight of the soul”. Surely I have felt more desperate at 3 AM than at almost any other hour of the day, but never more so in the first five months of Daigoro’s infancy.

After Daigoro had settled his sleep patterns enough that he was only getting up twice a night, we moved him into a crib in the spare bedroom. The deal was that I would get up, get him from the crib and bring him to the bed, where Marli would feed him. If you are keen on zombie films, you will have a good mental picture of my usual gait on those bleak evenings in the spring and summer of 2005. On the plus side, I did develop an excellent ability to walk around in the dark without turning on lights, which I’m sure will come in handy in any potential future careers as cat burglar or celebrity stalker.

Daigoro was feeding every three hours or so, which meant that Marli would give him a feeding just before he went to sleep at 8 PM, another at 11 PM, then again at 2 AM and 5 AM. This became fairly routine as time went on. Eventually, we were able to cut out the 2 AM feeding, and at six months (or was it eight? I can’t honestly remember at the moment), we applied the Ferber method fairly rigorously to allow him to go to sleep on his own and also sleep through the night. It was four days of fairly difficult periods of crying and thrashing (and that was just the parents), but in the end, it was well worth it. Daigoro fell asleep on his own, and largely stayed asleep through the night and has been able to do so ever since.

Looking back, it seems a little wimpy to be complaining today about having to get up at 6:30 in the morning when, for a long period, we were sleeping an average of 4-6 hours a night with at least two interruptions, and often more. The human mind has an amazing capacity to forget adversity. It’s a good thing; we’d probably have a lot fewer parents in the world.

We’re about to do the whole thing over again with Baby #2. I should start banking sleep now.

I need sleep.