I realized today we’re in for a rude awakening when daughter #2 arrives. How? Well, over the last six weeks, M. has settled into an excellent sleep schedule. Sometime around 7:00 PM, she gets a bath. Then we either play with her toys or watch a Baby Einstein DVD until just before 8:00. That’s when we pull out her stack of bedtime books and work through them on the living room couch. When we’re done, she tells S. good night and I carry her upstairs, with her saying “Night night mommy!” until we get to her room. It’s really funny when we’re just outside her room and she’s still yelling back to S.. I put her into bed, close the door, and she’s down. Some nights she talks and plays with her stuffed animals for a little while, but we’ve not had to go back into her room for over a month now (Jinx!). Then, she sleeps and sleeps and sleeps. Last night she was down for almost 12 hours. When she wakes up in the morning, she wakes up slowly and happily, starting with a few words here and there and eventually just chatting up her animals or the walls or whatever. When we go to get her, she’s always sitting up on her pillow and smiling.
What really rocks is she’s also settled into a great napping schedule. Most days she’s down sometime between noon and 1:00, and almost always for a minimum of two hours. Today she was down for over three. It wasn’t that long ago when we struggled to get her down for a 45 minute nap then tried to figure out how to get her to at least 7:00 PM before she crashed. All around excellent.
So, we’re finally back to sleeping like normal adults. Well, I am. S. is up every hour to either pee or because she’s getting kicked in the ribs or refluxing or whatever. And that’s all about to end with the little one waking us up every two hours. I coped pretty quickly in the early days of M., but I wasn’t a grad student who had to drive 140 miles three times a week then. I’m not looking forward to the sleep change part of our second round of fatherhood. As long as M. sticks to her schedule, I’m sure I’ll get through the next six weeks without destroying my GPA or falling asleep at the wheel. But if she suddenly begins having trouble sleeping, I might look into whether Starbucks has their own line of IVs.