After one night with no periods of sleep longer than 2 hours (or so), you are befuddled, wondering what the hell is wrong with the baby, that she is waking you up so often when she had been sleeping so much better. You go to work exhausted, feeling a little sorry for yourself, resolving to go to bed early that night.
On the second night with no period of sleep longer than 2 hours, you keep throwing little tantrums in the middle of the night. "An hour and a half?! What the hell? She can't possibly be hungry again!" You get angrier and angrier as the night goes on, and by morning you are wiped out from that as well as from the lack of sleep. Work keeps frustrating you so much that you keep bursting into tears. But you get to work from home that day, so things are a little better. You lie down and sleep when the baby goes to bed at 6:00, get up again at 6:45 or so, go back to bed for the night at 9:30.
After the third night, you are surprised to find that you actually don't feel too bad. When you walk back into the bedroom at 6:30, after your shower, you find the baby smiling and kicking her legs at you, and when you take her out of the crib, she tries to talk to you. Her voice is raspy and hoarse, and it occurs to you that although she might not have been hungry that often, she very likely could have been thirsty. The family is clearly passing around a mild cold. That day at work you find yourself giggling with a co-worker who happens to also be a mother of a baby, and another co-worker comments on what the two of you will be like when you get a good night's sleep. You laugh.
After the fourth night, when none of the periods of sleep even make it all the way to two hours, you feel like the walking dead. You leave for work before even the baby is happy to be awake, and for the second day in a row you don't see your older child at all in the morning (the same older child who told you last night, calmly, when you asked her what she thought, that "I think I don't want you to talk to me"). Your head is heavy, your eyes are scratchy and sore. You think you have no sense of humor, and you cry when the elevator door closes in your face for no explicable reason. You get to work before 7 with your Starbucks coffee with soy creamer (since you can't drink dairy because you're breastfeeding and eating dairy makes the baby, among other things, SLEEP BADLY, HA HA!), and although it's quiet and you should be getting a lot of work done, you have a hard time concentrating. You take some pictures of yourself and spend way too long writing a lengthy caption for one of them.
You are really hoping that the next night is better. And are grateful that even if it's not, you have Friday off.
Or maybe that's just me.
