In which “babies sleep all the time” turns out to be a filthy, filthy lie

I’ve blown through my queue again and there was a week without a post. My apologies. That should be a good indicator that things are hectic.

Baby is wonderful and I love her insanely. She just gets cuter and smarter and more wonderful every single day. The weirdest part about this, to me, is how you simultaneously find yourself excited to see her hitting milestones and growing up and depressed that she’s not as small and little as she once was. She’s just awesome, that is really all.

I know having kids is not something people want and I am 110% supportive of that. So I’m never going to tell anyone that they must have kids, they’d love it, etc. All I’m going to say is that, going into this not really sure how I’d feel about being a parent, my husband and I are really truly enjoying ourselves. So do with that what you will.

Among the little one’s many charms, however, is not the ability to nap. Without going into the long drawn out story, let’s leave it at this: it’s taken me 8 months of hard work to finally get her to take naps during the day. This hard work has stretched the original three 15 minute naps a day of when she was a newborn to three 30 minute naps a day that, once or twice a week based on criteria known only to her, stretch luxuriously long into 45 minute naps or even 1 whole hour. Now, if you’re going “But I thought babies slept, like, all the time and took two 2 to 3 hour naps a day up until they’re three years old”, I say to you, “Ha! Hahahaha! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!” and then I let a couple of tears slide down but are sure to dab them up with the hair I’ve pulled out of my head before you notice. Normal babies are “down” to “only” 3 to 5 hours of sleep during that day by this point which is hilarious in a pencil in the eye kind of way because she has never, ever slept that much, not even when she was days old.

Are there days when I am All Work And No Play Makes Hillary A Dull Girl because all I do is non-stop baby time and then use every spare second to work? Of course. I’m only human. 99% of the time it’s like this: Yes, I’m really tired. But I don’t care about getting sleep as we’ve discussed. Yes, I have no time at all to get anything done and that’s causing problems but I’m zen about that too. My philosophy when it comes to this No Naps Evah drama has been that I’m lucky. Most moms are getting 3 to 5 less hours a day with their little ones when they are sleeping and I’m getting all this extra time to play and spend time with her during the precious little time she’s a baby. I’d be perfectly happy to just let her never sleep if that’s what she wanted.

Except that, clearly, she needs the sleep. She gets cranky and miserable and overtired which is maddening because it’s like, then why don’t you sleep more, you silly little thing? I keep trying various things to try to get her to sleep  and things that work one day don’t work the next so it’s all one big work in progress. I just want to reach the point where she seems happy and well rested, no matter how much actual sleep she ends up getting and I feel like we are at least on the path to that point. If nothing else, I’ve gotten it down from how it used to be (where getting her to sleep was a process of anywhere from 30 minutes to 4 hours) to now she falls asleep almost every time in less than 10 minutes which is a massive triumph and I should probably be getting some kind of parade for that, just sayin.

Anyway, at this moment she is both sick and cutting another set of teeth so all sleep progress is out the window until she’s better.

But I mention all of this because I must confess to being more than a little bitter to have been so thoroughly lied to. The one thing I head over and over from  friends, strangers and many articles was how easy it was to get lots of work/naps/whatever done in the first year because the baby would sleep all the time and you could just tote them around from place to place while they were sleeping. Just a few days ago, I saw a friend who was expecting post something about being tired on Facebook and her other friends were all like, “Don’t worry, there’s plenty of time for naps the whole first year!” and I wanted to be like LIES! Because, if there’s two things I’ve learned from this experience it’s

1. Not all babies sleep all the time and MANY have sleep troubles of varying degrees
2. People just straight up lie to you

If I hadn’t been so pumped full of bad info over and over again, this situation wouldn’t be so stressful because I wouldn’t have had any false expectations!

When I’m talking to these very same people who stressed to me how much downtime I’d have the first year while the baby was sleeping about the problems we were having now, they are suddenly all like “I know exactly what you mean, Little Johnny didn’t take a single nap over 30 minutes until he was 2” and you’re just like WHAT? THEN WHY DID YOU FREAKING TELL ME THAT BS ABOUT SLEEPING ALL THAT TIME? and then you remember that time you were over their house for coffee and Little Johnny took that 3 and half hour nap while you guys were chatting and it’s just like, WHY CAN’T SOMEONE JUST TELL THE TRUTH OMG.

Whew. OK. Sorry.

As you can see, this is a sore spot.

Anyway, the point of this post is to offer any of you that might be planning to have kids some day a little PSA.

1. SOME babies sleep all the time. Yours may not. Prepare yourself accordingly and don’t go into it expecting that your experience will be anything like someone else’s. This goes from pretty much everything. Your baby is a unique person and sweeping generalizations may not apply to her/him so don’t get attached to any ideas of what it will be like. Just assume everything will be as difficult as possible and you will be pleasantly surprised when it isn’t instead of the other way around.
2. Your friends/neighbors/articles you read are full of crap so take everything they tell you with a huge grain of salt. It’s not that they are specifically maliciously lying to you it’s just that the first year of a baby is such chaos that people give you advice based on foggy mis-rememberings of times when they were half-asleep. To a mom with a 5 year old running around, it must be very easy to be nostalgic for when they were a newborn and romanticize it as when you had all this free time. (Or maybe other moms really do have tons of free time and it’s all a conspiracy, what do I know?) There is also this weird competitive element to advice that people want to simultaneously brag that they had it easier/imply that your problem is nothing and they had it much worse so they exaggerate/fib accordingly.

What does any of this have to do with writing? Just that I’m getting precious little time to do any of it is all.

Hilariously, while I was writing this, the little one just took a nap for a full hour and half which has only happened about 6 times in her entire life so it just goes to show that no one knows anything, least of all me.The one thing I’m sure of is that it’s probably bad to act on the urge to punch the well meaning friend who brags about how she wrote her first novel on her maternity leave because she had so much free time. Probably.

(I’m telling myself this was not in violation of my Never Blog About Parenting rule because it’s writing relevant since writers shouldn’t go into having kids with false ideas of the time they’ll have to write. Really it’s more like I have spent 8 months wanting to blog about the no sleep thing and 8 months telling myself it was TMI and I wasn’t allowed. But almost every post I set out to write ends up being about the no sleep thing I finally decided to just give in and blog about it to get it out of my system. I apologize for the digression. This was a one time thing and I promise you that this will never ever become a Mommy Blog.)