Sleep

Parents are unbelievably annoying people

People without kids might be nodding at this because they already know where I'm going. So allow me to uncloud the eyes of all the parents out there by asking you a question.

Have you ever found yourself responding to something a friend has said with; "Pah! Wait till you have kids"?

The only truthful answer to this is "yes", in which case you're an annoying shit. But don't worry, so am I. We just have to live with that. It's one of the burdens of parenthood. That and higher depreciation on our cars because of crisps in the seats and crayon on the roof lining. Oh, and decreased sex-drive. I'll move on from this before I fail to remember why I had children...

Anyway, since you parents will have said this dreary line. I'll make another prediction. I'll bet you used this phrase when someone said; "Man, I'm tired. I didn't sleep very well last night."

Nothing drives a non-breeder crazier than that. As if you have to have kids to truly understand the meaning of sleep deprivation. Clearly that's ridiculous. However, I've been racking my brain to come up with something that adequately describes having a newborn baby that won't sleep. The only words that come to mind is; "GET BACK OR I'LL JUMP!!!"

Before I had the Kids, I was an insomniac. Since I've had the Kids I've become narcoleptic. These days if I sit on a sofa without something to do (like writing this) there's a good chance I'll be snoring within ten minutes. Its safe to assume that on evenings when there isn't a blog entry here I've probably fallen asleep before I've thought of a topic, and dribbled into the keyboard. My body seems to work on the principle that, even if I can't "bank" sleep, I'll give it a bloody good go.

I will say here and now that we are very lucky, the Boy and Girl go to bed between six and seven (yes, that's right), sleep between twelve and thirteen hours, rarely complain when they go to bed, rarely wake us up in the middle of the night. You might think that I'm a bit smug about that, and you'd be right. It's taken five years to get to this point. Things were not always this way.

For the first three weeks of the Boy's life he slept for a maximum of two hours at a time. This meant that the Wife and I took it in shifts through the night and averaged about four hours sleep per night, which can have an impact on your sanity. (At this point in the story people often say to me; "Margaret Thatcher only slept for three hours a night." A good point, except the woman currently thinks she's a gerkin.)

Initially this lack of sleep was a bit of a novelty. I watched a lot of DVD boxed sets, I got a lot of reading done. The novelty lasted three days.  On day three I vanished and was only discovered when the Wife heard me crying. In the toilet. Whilst asleep. Later that day I found myself suggesting quite seriously that the Wife "put him back in until he stops crying." Turns out it was a feeding issue which took three weeks to resolve before he started sleeping about five hours at a time. By the end of those three weeks both the Wife and I were clinically insane. For instance, that first night he started sleeping properly we were so unused to him being quiet for that long we kept checking to see if he was still breathing. I chose to do this first by watching his chest, then holding a mirror to his face and finally by poking him until he woke up and started crying. Because that seemed logical at the time. Naturally, the Wife thought this was somewhat counter productive, which she explained with a right hook.

It is impossible to be a rational human being when you've just been woken up for the fifth time in a night. At two in the afternoon it's much easier to accept that babies can't tell you what's wrong than it is at two in the morning. At two in the morning shouting "GO TO SLEEP!" seems like a sensible response to a crying baby. At two in the morning using a bottle steriliser will, more often than not, lead to you melting your face off. At two in the morning you will attempt to bottle feed your child without actually being awake at any point and not notice you're pushing the teat up the poor little sod's nose.

All of which assumes you lost the battle of "who can pretend to be asleep longest?" The usual ritual in our house is that the loser has to fling back the covers, snarl "Fine!" before stomping off and trying to be comforting whilst livid.

The only way I managed to get through of this was that once I'd been woken up I'd never expect to get back to sleep again. And that worked quite well. Because I didn't sleep for three years.