When you have a baby, they can sense that you like to sleep. They want to teach you that you're being a glutton for sleep and the way they teach you is to dabble in vampire-like tendencies. My sweet Cece has had a smorgasbord of sleep patterns over the past 5 months. She has helped me become a very capable internet researcher of all things baby sleep related. Here's what the internet told me: nothing. The interwebs have many different theories about what Moose and I are doing wrong when trying to get Cece to sleep at night. We actually do a really good job of getting her to sleep, it's the staying asleep part that's tricky.
In her first month of life, she slept for 45 minutes at a time. Day and night, night and day we tried to survive on multiple periods of rest. We rested, because it's impossible to get to the REM cycle in 45 minutes. I'm still apologizing to people that called, texted or came to visit me during this first month. I remember wearing maybe 2 different outfits and treating a trip to the mailbox like I won a vacation to St. Maarten. There was one day where a family friend came over and said something like, " You two go sleep for 4 hours, I'll watch your baby." I was so excited by the fact that I was going to have 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep, that I couldn't sleep for the first hour.
Months two and three went beautifully, Cece fell into a rhythm of falling asleep by midnight and waking up at 7. We had 7 hours in a row of pure sleep. I was able to do things like form coherent sentences when speaking to people. I could find my keys in seconds instead of wandering around the house looking in every possible idiotic place. I wore more than 2 outfits. Life was getting back to normal. Then, month 4 arrived. Cece decided she wanted to party at midnight, 3 AM, 6 AM and 8 AM. These are unacceptable partying hours. Some people say to me, "well at least you can nap during the day when she naps!" These people don't know that Cece only naps for 20 minutes at a time during the day. Maybe I need to start researching about how to fall asleep efficiently in 1 minute so that I can have 19 full minutes of rest. I don't want you to feel sorry for me, I want you to come over and watch Cece so I can sleep. Just kidding! I would love to hear your own stories and experiences with baby sleep patterns. I know that this too shall pass and I will miss the days that she wants to party with her parents at all hours of the night.