I tried to get by on four hours sleep a night for as long as I could, but I appear to have hit the wall, and hard. Charles has been a bit colicky, which means basically he alternates between brief moments of calmness and brief moments of outright screaming. The bits of calmness aren’t as restful as you might think.
We’ve usually been able to get him to bed around midnight, but he’s usually up at 4 or so. Sometimes he also awakes at 2, and Sarah feeds him and puts him back to sleep, but when he’s up at 4, he is UP. Completely awake, looking around, wondering why we keep trying to put him back in the bassinet. This means that I have to spend roughly an hour downstairs bouncing up and down on my toes while watching TV. This does not a restful daddy make.
Over the weekend, when he would do this, I would just stay up. No big deal, I thought, I’ll just nap in the afternoon. Unfortunately, I’m not a good napper, and I feel compelled to get things done around the house as much as I can. So from about Thursday to Sunday, I totalled 16 hours of sleep in a 96 hour period. Not good. Not good at all. I was having horrible headaches all day long.
Finally, it caught up with me Sunday night. Around 11pm, Charles was still awake. He was reasonably happy at this point, having worked out some of the colic by pooping all over himself in a particularly stinky manner, so I handed him to Sarah and said “Hey, if you can get him to sleep, awesome. If not, put him in the crib in his room and let him scream, because if I don’t sleep right now I’m going to start weeping.” She took him, fed him, and put him down, and I stayed zonked until about 5 am when he needed bounced around for a while. We did that, which had little effect, and I handed him to Sarah, who tried to feed him for a while and eventually just laid him down between us in our bed. He was out like a light until roughly 9am. And so were we. It was outstanding.
Apparently I hadn’t fully refilled the sleep tank, so last night was pretty much the same. He was down around midnight, up at 4, bounced until 5, back in bed next to me until 8 or so, when Sarah changed him and fed him and asked me if I had any intention of getting up and going to work. I thanked her profusely for reminding me, and told her that if she spoke to me again before 9am I would divorce her.
Ha ha! Just kidding! She’s usually the one that makes the divorce threats. I don’t take them very seriously, though; if she wanted to be single she’d just have me killed.
I’m still tired. Vacation can’t come soon enough.
