Little Human How to

Everyone tells you before you have a child that sleep kind of goes out the window. You’re told to take advantage of all the sleep you can get pre newborn. Excuse me, but who is getting sleep while pregnant? I sure as heck was not. Between getting up in the middle of the night 5…or what feels like 500, times just to pee and the invasion into your chest cavity, peaceful sleep is long gone by the time you’re getting close to bringing baby home.

I’m sure two-parent households are just as bad with both of y’all not getting any sleep with a baby, but you guys would have to let me know about that one. Over here we were (and are) a one zombie household. Clearly, I didn’t sleep that great while I was pregnant, but I still didn’t expect what I came to experience with a newborn. Well, not even a newborn, just a baby trying to come into the world. My literal sleepless nights started when I went into labor, which trust me will be it’s very own story. To cut to the short version I was in labor for three days and didn’t sleep for hardly any of them. By the time I actually pushed that baby out of me I was already exhausted and then had to be on a hospital schedule being barged in on every couple of hours for meals, medicine, or baby checks. On top of that I was at the hospital alone and felt way too uncomfortable to sleep.

Coming home should’ve been a different story right? Wrong. I thankfully had my parents visit from Connecticut because duh, what grandparent doesn’t want to see their alien looking newborn grandbaby. It was great to have them there while I recovered, but I still did nights alone and that whole “sleep while the baby sleeps” during the day thing is garbage. Don’t you know a sleeping baby is the cutest thing on the planet? Right next to literally EVERYTHING else your offspring can do. But seriously who wants to sleep through that little peaceful cuddling stage. However, one thing the parenting books did get right was warning you that nighttime would not consist of being cozy sleeping in your own bed. Oh nono, nighttime was spent mindlessly rocking in a chair in the nursery, or sometimes in your bed when you’re too tired to make your legs function.

Don’t get me wrong I know that I am extremely blessed with my little one’s sleeping habits. However, the first month was pretty much my definition of hell, but that was due to some other feeding issues that we can get into at another time. Once Lilly was 6 weeks old, yes, barely a human, she decided she was going to sleep better in her own crib rather than co-sleeping. Her next “big girl” decision was that she was gonna sleep 12 hours straight at night. HOLY CRAP!!! I could sleep! Yeah except not exactly, because instead I just stayed up being paranoid about why she was sleeping so long and if I should wake her up to feed her and 500 other things that your brain likes to throw at you at the worst times.

For the most part, she has stayed sleeping through the night since then. Of course nap schedules change whenever she dictates and shes down to more like 10 hours of sleep at night instead of 12. I know this makes me lucky. Some people get it waaaayyy worse than I have it with Lilly. However, I think what feels so bad about the current schedule is that she faked me out with sleeping so well for so long because now we are here….at sleep regression. WHY?! I guess she thinks she has to keep me on my toes because her normal schedule now is bedtime at 8 sometimes one stir during the night and then a wake up around 5, have a bottle, a change, and back to sleep for an hour or two. She then likes to get a little crazy and throw a night like this in there every couple of days when she knows I’m getting comfortable. Bed at 8, wake up at 10, 11, 12, 2, 2:15, 2:30, 2:40, 3, and finally awake for the day at 6 am. Or she decides she wants to wake up at 4:30 in the morning and it’s party time until a nap at noon. Like EXCUSE ME?! What kind of shenanigans are these sleep habits.

Don’t even get me started on nap time. She a great napper, but they are so inconsistent. Her “normal” naps have become about two hours long, but then there’s have the ones that are three or four hours that make me uneasy the whole time. The worst is when I actually need to get something done and Lilly says she wants to throw a wrench into that plan and only sleep an hour….or less. Then there’s the elimination of a nap. I always used to hear parents talk about transitioning their children from two naps a day to one, usually around when they turn a year old. I thought that meant it was a parental decision….something you wean into. I was wrong again, as I seem to be about a lot of the new developments lately. We’re really just going with the flow over here. One day Lilly had an afternoon nap and the next she just shrieked like a dang hyena and hasn’t really had another one since then. On the bright side it means I usually take a walk with her to get through the evening crankiness. Good way to (finally) start losing that baby weight I guess, right? Bottom line here is that I am desperate to know when this cycle of sleep regression ends and I can stop being exhausted 24/7…..please tell me it ends. Oh, and SEND COFFEE!

Picture this….you buy a house and it takes a few months, but you finally make it look (mostly) how you want it. You make it a home. A baby is coming soon, so you’re preparing by setting up the swing, the bassinet, and the other simple things needed for an infant.

A few months later there’s the miracle of child birth (even if it last 76 hours)….you come home with a newborn and all of a sudden it seems like your space isn’t quite yours anymore. There’s nursing/feeding and changing stations in almost every room, just as a precaution. I mean, you never know when your newborn is going to, oh I don’t know, blow out their diaper in your hand. Newborns and infants don’t require THAT much stuff though, at least that’s how I feel now knowing the next phase. It’s just swings and bouncers and nursing pillows and rattles. No one really warns you of what comes next.

Even before having Lilly I had spent hours upon hours on websites trying to figure out what baby products were actually necessary. I don’t have a large house and space is a luxury, so I wanted to keep the big stuff to a minimum. Except, what they don’t tell you is that as the little one grows so do their contraptions. The relatively small bouncers and swings, etc. last a surprisingly short amount time….especially for the money spent on them. Then comes the upgrade of activity mats and saucers. A saucer? Who thought of that? Do not get me wrong, they’re great to plop a baby in when you need to get stuff done and soooo cute to watch them figure out how to use those things we call legs. Howeverrrrr, how the heck am I supposed to make a giant round object Feng Shui with my living room furniture.

Take it a step further and we have a mobile tiny human. Is there anything scarier than that? See I’m not one to go around bubble wrapping my house or my child, but doesn’t everything suddenly become a death trap?? So then come the playpens because you have to corral them somehow…I mean we have to get dishes done right? I started “small” and got a pop-up octagon one made by Summer Infant. Definitely does the job, I will warn you though it’s all one piece and isn’t washable, big design flaw in my opinion for anything kid related. Turns out they grow out of that pretty quickly too. Now I use that as a portable play area for outside or, what I think is the best use, at the beach. This still leaves needing some type of playpen for inside though, because let me tell you toy storage does NOT mean toys stay off of the floor.

I’d like to introduce you all to the biggest, most ridiculous baby/toddler purchase to date. It is a 70″x71″ baby cage from amazon and it is amazinggggggg. I can fully lay down in this thing when playing with Lilly and it has cute little zip down holes when I want her to be able to have access to dragging her toys all over the living room. In all seriousness this thing has been great so far. It is the same size her play mat was anyway and now contains all of her floor and overflow toys from her bin. One hundred percent will take over any room you put it in, but is so beyond worth it. As is everything else in this post by the way….just a little heads up that my house was going to become baby’s play land would’ve been nice. Feel free to leave some comments about what your unexpected baby must have or have nots are! Until next time, hang in there ya’ll.