Available on Ebay: 700 Hous of Sleep

"People who say they sleep like a baby usually don't have one." ~Leo J. Burke

Here’s the deal: We’re tired.

A fellow teacher at my school told me last week that, on average, a new mom loses around 700 hours of sleep the first year after giving birth. 700 hours. How do you get that back?

I suppose we could nap during the day when Audrey is sleeping. But after feeding her and changing her and burping her and such, you have about two hours before the process begins again. It’ s during this brief window that we try to cram in all our activities for the day: laundry, vacuuming, grocery shopping, reading a book, balancing the budget, hanging some shelves in the nursery, grading papers, sorting the mail. . . you get the point. We haven’t been doing much napping. None actually.

Cutting further into our precious sleep time is the fact that Audrey continues to be afflicted with “lower gas,” or what her mom calls, “the bubbles.” All babies suffer from this to some degree, but Audrey’s doctor-prescribed high calorie diet makes it worse. So much that Janell even called the doctor’s office earlier this week to see if we could switch to Similac Advance, the regular formula for newborns, to try to relieve some of her discomfort. No go. Doctor Hans wants our little premiee to be on the high-cal Similac NeoSure for 6 to 9 months.

So we’ll continue to try help our little girl. And we’ll deal with her occasionally crying throughout the night. And we’ll probably have more sleepy exchanges like this one from the other night after I returned to bed after a 3:00 am feeding.

Matt, getting into bed, zombie-like: “Peanut’s sleeping. She ate well.”

Janell, rousing slightly: “Did you put her in the basket?”

Matt: “. . .Um. . . What was that?”

Janell, eyes still closed: “Is she in something that won’t roll away?”

Matt: “? .. .Yeah, I guess she is.”

Janell: “Ok love you goodnight.”

Matt: “Love you too goodnight.”

Like I said - we’re tired. But we did enjoy a brief respite yesterday as Grammy Roz took Audrey for the night. Relieved of parental duties for a few hours, we darted to Target to pick out my new eye glasses. Then is was off to Red Lobster for some fine dining. And then we stopped at Lowe’s, the blue Home Depot, to pick out shelves for Audrey’s room. We returned home and watched the movie Paper Clips. Then we fell asleep and slept through the night. It was a near perfect night, marred only by nagging guilt brought by the absence of our little girl. Janell called her mother three times to check on her. I tried to play it cool, but I was shamelessly giddy the next day when we picked her up. I guess those lost hours of sleep are a small, small price to pay.