11.07.2008

Sleep, damn you!

I can't sleep. My whole life, it has been easy for me to wake up in the mornings and be productive almost immediately. In college I woke up 4 days a week extra early to go to the gym, including Saturdays. I rarely am able to take naps during the day, and I am horrible at staying up late. Granted, there have been a few exceptions, but mostly this is always true.

Toss a baby into that mix, and things get exhausting. "Sleep when the baby sleeps!" they all tell me. Um, I can't. I can count on one hand how many daytime naps I've taken in the three weeks since the girl got here. When nighttime rolls around, I am so tired I can hardly think straight. I go to sleep, wake up every two or three hours with her, sleep with her on the couch if I have to, and then when she wakes up in the morning to eat, whether it's 6am or 9am, I wake up too and then I'm up for the day. 

I try to sleep. I make myself lay down and I turn the TV off, but usually all I can do is think about all the things that need to get done around the house and around my life. Sleep when she sleeps? Yeah right, life still goes on, and my to do list is only getting longer and longer. I need to cancel my membership at the gym. I need to vacuum my bedroom. I need to empty the dishwasher and color my hair and go grocery shopping and eat lunch (is it lunchtime already??) and call about car insurance and write in her baby book and spend time with my husband and check my email and feed her again and send in my timesheets for work.

Shit. I forgot to send in my timesheets for work.

What comforts me is that one day she will sleep through the night, and I will finally get some work done.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just wait until she starts going 4 hours or so between feedings...it feels like you won the lottery. But you'll probably wake up in a pool of breastmilk, so you'll have that to look forward to.

I never took naps either. I also never understood why people brought meals to new parents...don't you totally get it now?

I hope you are getting some bitchin' meals. Wish I could bring one by!

Anonymous said...

you should definitely read dooce.com kate. go back into her history and read through her own travails of being a new mother...

she's sort of the internet's most popular "mom blogger" and it just so happens that she supports her whole family through her blog. but i digress...

reading her site for the last however many years has prepared me, i think a little bit at least, for what it will be like to have little creatures running around my home.

also she dealt with terrible post-partum depression. blah blah blah.

spend some time there. she's a good blogger-type of writer.