Sleep. We all need it. We all want it. But us mums don’t really get much of it, do we?
No one reallllly told me when I fell pregnant that getting a good night’s sleep was now a thing of the past. For ever. And ever.
Back then, I thought that when my baby was born, I would be getting up in the night, just a little weary and feeding my happy little bundle of joy for a minute or two and then pop them back in the cot and hop off to finish the rest of my sleep. Then, I thought, when they were on solids, everyone in the house would sleep from bedtime to morning time. Every single night.
Blissful ignorance that was!!
Let me tell you, for the first 3 months there is no such thing as day and night. It is one continuous stream of exhausting moments occasionally and briefly interrupted by a completely useless cat nap. Then just as you can see a light at the end of the sleepless tunnel, BAM! along comes the Four Month sleep regression or the Wonder Week or as I like it to call it, The First Circle of Hell. Forget about sleep and forget about it for a whole entire month.
Then when that is over, you have the teething. Yay. Teething is not just waking up to re-swaddle or do the pat/shoosh thing, it is waking up to your darling screaming like a demon and you nearly killing yourself in the panic to get to them. This can go on for days and nights and days and nights.
Then when teething is over, you have daycare colds and strange diseases you may not have even heard of! This involves lots more crying as well as an abundance of unwelcome and very nasty bodily fluids. Endlessly. And everywhere. Sleeptime is spent changing clothes, changing sheets and Googling the weirdest of symptoms.
That ever present feeling of sleeplessness is generally overcome by a feeling of hate and resentment to anyone else that is not you.
Then when that slows down, there is the 18 month nightmares. Nothing is less fun than waking to your child screaming bloody murder and accidentally running into a wall as you race into their room to ‘save them’ from an imaginary monster.
Then there is the cutting of the 2 year old molars (refer previous comments on teething but mulitply that by TEN).
Then there is their diet, their milestones, the MCHN comments, school worries, their homework, bullying, girlfriends, boyfriends, growing pains, tweenage issues, puberty, sneaking out, sneaking in, exams, finishing school, schoolies week, their 21st, moving out, not moving out, their career, their family, their kids……
When will end? Well aparantly my mum still loses sleep over her kids to this day, so I guess it doesn’t end.
There, now you have been told the truth.