DOH!! … (head slap)
Okay, so as a parent there are these moments when you wonder what the hell has just happened to your sleep, routine, life, whatever … because something that you have come to depend on as routine and expected suddenly changes with no warning whatsoever. Frequently you read about this stuff before you have the baby but when it actually happens your brain seems to have spilled the information out into the dirty diaper pail during one of the five hundred middle-of-the-night diaper changes.
Noah’s sleep was shot all to bloody hell about a week ago and it left me frantically fumbling around like a sixteen year old in the dark after getting caught making out with a boy.
So I did what I do when things happen to me: I blogged about it.
And my fabulous readers who I love more than blogging itself left me a comment and told me to go read some stuff that Moxie wrote awhile back about babies and … (DUH DUH DUUUUHHHHHHHH) why their sleep gets all fucked up at certain times of their lives.
The concept is called sleep regression and it is detailed in a book called The Wonder Weeks where it goes into detail rather extensively but the short of it is that there are several periods of time during which neurological growth is so intense that baby’s sleep is interrupted, often intensely so. Those periods of growth include weeks 5, 8, 12, 19, 26, 37, 46, and 55 (that’s as far as they studied), according to the authors, Hetty Vanderijt and Frans Plooij.
KEY: MORE DRAMATIC MUZAK BECAUSE NOAH IS 19 WEEKS OLD RIGHT NOW.
So I assume this will fade, in time, and if not, and he never sleeps through the night again, I am taking a definite peace that in 18 years it won’t be my problem anymore.
So you know … at some point, it’ll get better.
I also totally attribute my lackadaisical bordering on psychotic calmness to the sleep deprivation that I am experiencing due to this little sleep regression thingy.
May 2nd, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Dude, I am SO THERE. If I have to get up ONE MORE TIME to replace the pacifier and say, “Shhhh.. it’s STILL sleepytime.”, I’m gonna go nuts.
If I can find the energy.