In our house, the man is the one that gets up with the baby in the middle of the night. This was decided in the early days of the baby’s youth due to my inability to get back to sleep after tending to said baby for any amount of time in the middle of the night. Luckily, the man works from home so that too lends itself well to his being able to be flexible around exhaustion. I also, don’t do as well on reduced sleep as the man does. So he tends to the midnight baby attacks.
Last weekend, however, I decided I needed to take a turn. I got up with the sick baby at 1 AM and tended to him for 45 minutes. After getting back into bed it took me 3 HOURS to get back to sleep. I am paying for this dearly. I am now getting sick, falling asleep on the job, and just generally feel pitiful. I am a really ineffective mother. Who has a baby and then isn’t able to effectively get up with them at night AND function during the day. They should have job applications for motherhood. Then maybe I would have been weeded out so that my baby and my husband didn’t have to pay dearly for my short comings.
In the meantime, I’ll try to make up for it with cookies and cuddles.
No one is good at getting up in the middle of the night the first few times. You would just have to do it consistently for your body to realize it must sleep when it can. After months of not waking up in the middle of the night, it would be an anomaly for you to discover that you can survive on only 3 hours of sleep a night. You would need to submit your body to science for further study. (Also, I'm met the man in the morning...you can feel assured you have him beat on pleasantness from 7-10am.)
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