I have always been a very light sleeper. And I have always had difficulty getting to sleep. As a very anxious person I sometimes have difficulty shutting down my brain. And shutting down became nigh on impossible with the advent of being responsible for another human life.
To get to sleep, I (like babies) need to follow a sort of routine (learnt after many years of sleep-drama*). I need to be comfortably warm (I wear socks to bed). I need to be in absolute darkness (I wear a sleep mask). I need things to be pretty much completely quiet. To help shut down my brain, I read pointless stuff just before bed (at the moment it's Game of Thrones). If I am still having trouble shutting down my brain, I focus on my breathing, or do some counting exercises. It usually takes me half an hour to an hour to get to sleep at night.
I cannot sleep in hospital. I cannot sleep on planes. I generally struggle to sleep in places other than at home. And I wake easily. I usually have to pee once or twice during the night (and no, I'm not diabetic, just have a tiny bladder), and when Murray comes to bed, or gets up for work, or snores it completely wakes me up (we hardly ever sleep in the same bed). This means I honestly can't remember the last time I've slept for a consecutive period of more than six hours. It was definitely before I was pregnant.
And now I have a baby I can only vaguely remember the last time I had three hours of consecutive sleep.
This is also in part because I am an excessively paranoid crazy person regarding SIDS. This is a silly thing to obsess about. The rates in NZ are really low compared to when I was a baby. And it's not like I have any of the factors that increase the chances of Etta having SIDS. I have never smoked. I am not obese. I am not an alcoholic. I don't co-sleep unsafely or let her sleep on her stomach. But I can't stop thinking about it. I still check if Etta is breathing at least once an hour (because if she wasn't breathing I'd have more of a chance of resuscitating her than if it were less frequently. I've brought this down from half hourly..) It's insane and not good for either of us. And now I'm so used to checking her that if I sleep for longer than two hours I usually have a nightmare, wake up, freak out and have to check her.
So with my regular sleep issues and the crazy SIDS stuff combined, I consequently don't sleep very much.
This is not something I get off on. I am not one of those people who thrives on coffee and energy drinks and three hours sleep and how-much-work-I-can-get-done-at-crazy o'clock.
'Man, after getting all the housework done I only had about three hours sleep'...
That's not me. I am someone who actually likes sleeping, would never stay up past 1am to finish an assignment, and if I could do it, I would sleep most of the day. Pre-baby, I was a bed-by 11-at-the-latest-preferably-10.30 type of person, and a big night out meant I was out until midnight. Now I have a baby, I'm in bed by 9.30 at the latest in an attempt to maximise any kind of sleeping opportunity.
And the whole sleep-while-your-baby-is-sleeping is a total crock when you have a baby who naps in 45 minute blocks (unless you're like my husband and can fall asleep in seconds)... by the time I get to sleep there are about 10 - 15 minutes until she wakes up again... Due to exhaustion and little brain I have been using 'wake aids' to survive - berocca, cups of tea and chocolate... probably not the healthiest way to exist, but gets me through each day.
And I know this is crazy. So lately I've been doing my best to think of other solutions to my no-sleep saga.
I need to ensure ya'll know that yes, I have a wonderful supportive partner, and that he really does his best to look after Etta so that I can sleep. But unfortunately, we have a baby who WILL NOT take a bottle (of expressed breast milk or anything else). So our pre-pregnancy plan (he minds her until midnight so I can get some sleep before I take over) went out the window. We would love to do this, and it would definitely help my sleep, but at the moment it's just not possible. And Murray does mind her in the mornings on weekends when I'm exhausted, but due to it being daytime ie - not completely dark or silent, I generally can't sleep anyway.
At the same time as the no-sleep saga, we've also had the our-baby-is-ridicously-tall saga, which has resulted in us having to move her into her own room sooner than we intended. Her cot is too big to fit in our room, and she is far too big to fit in her bassinet. Because Plunket recommends sleeping in the same room with your baby for the first six months, I knew this was going to add another layer to my SIDS paranoia, so I started taking some actions to address this.
I'm actually a pretty logical person most of the time and I knew that this fear was ridiculous. If I could trick the crazy-new-Mum hormonal part of my brain, I figured everything would be ok. So I compared the SIDS death stats with some regular death stats. If Etta's been on a car ride during the day, at nap time (or bed time), I say to myself 'Etta is fourteen times more likely to die in a car accident than of SIDS. And you let her go in the car, so surely you can let her sleep for a couple of hours without checking her'. Now for some people that'd make them freak out about taking their baby in the car, but I know that's as crazy as my existing crazy (and a way harder to hide kind of crazy), so it's actually been oddly reassuring. This, combined with getting a baby monitor, has started to bring in line my hypervigilance in checking Etta while she's asleep. And while I slept on her bedroom floor the first four nights she was in her own room, I have let her sleep in there by herself since then.
Which has been great, and (seems to, sometimes) has helped her sleep. But it still hasn't magically cured my sleep dramas. So I decided to invest some money in trying out a breast-feeding-safe sleep naturopathic medicine thingee. I'd read about some sleep drops on this on an online NZ Mummy forum, and heard it was supposed to actually work. The first night I tried them (along with a sleep support drink from the same people) it actually had a weird effect on me. When Etta woke up and I went to feed her (I was sleeping on her floor at the time) I was mega dizzy. Not a high kind of dizzy, a dizzy exactly like I had been spinning in one direction for a while and just stopped. Everything was pulling to the left and I worried that I might fall over. So I didn't pick Etta up. Murray brought her to me in my bed, and he slept on her floor (to help me get peace of mind). The next morning I felt fine.
I emailed the sleep drops people to see if they had any suggestions, and they haven't encountered this before, but recommended a different dosage in case I had a sensitivity to one of the ingredients (totally possible, our family has intolerances/allergies up the wazoo). And it seems like the reduced dose is somewhat helping. I'm (usually) finding it easier to get back to sleep after having to get up to feed Etta, and I'm (usually) falling asleep quicker at night. It's quite possibly a placebo effect, but it doesn't matter - the end result is the same.
But after all this hard work, at the end of the day when your baby's not sleeping, you can't really sleep. And Etta's just hit another rough patch (partly wonder weeks, and partly stupid fireworks). So I still haven't managed more than a three hour sleep run, but I'm feeling confident that it WILL happen at some point. And the past 5 months have flown by, so what's another year or two...
* In short form, sleep drama means bouts of insomnia that are untreatable via sleeping pills or sedatives as they don't work on me (weird extreme susceptibility to some medications, and absolutely no effect on me from others. Causes problems in hospital) and just issues with sleeping in general.
