Sleep like a baby

One specific statement that has changed meaning for me so much since having kids is,  "I'm going to sleep like a baby tonight!!!"

Before I had kids the idea of sleeping like a baby sounded fantastic, but now that I have been subjected to the sleep/wake cycles of 3 babies over the past 5 years (and have aged at least 10) I want nothing to do with it.

Let's take a look to see what it would be like if I truly slept like a baby....

The average newborn baby sleeps 16-17 hours a day.  I usually get 6 combined hours and I can't even get everything done. When I think of it I keep picturing the kids stuck to the floors, playing in mountains of laundry, and living on cheez-its and milk. 

A baby has the ability to fall asleep at the drop of the hat when he/she is tired, overstimulated, growing, sick, or otherwise in the mood for some shut-eye.  If I fell asleep when I experienced any of those things,  it would happen 10-15 times a day on a typical day and I would be considered debilitatingly narcoleptic.

Babies sleep in some downright adorable positions.  A favorite of mine is when they sleep on their tummies with their butts up in the air..  If I slept like that I would end up waking up with two totally dead arms, a swollen face, stiff neck, numb legs, and a back so screwed up I would have to hobble around like Quasimodo. 

A young baby can wake up to eat 3-5 times a night. If that were me I would weigh 300 pounds easily.

Many babies need some kind of soothing device to fall asleep. My parents paid way too much money on orthodontic work for me to end up with a pacifier induced open-bite so that wouldn't work.  I'm prone to motion sickess so rocking wouldn't go over well at all. That pretty much leaves a vibrating bed and  I could list a slew of reasons why that would be a bad idea but I'll let you figure those out for yourselves.

And finally, the biggest reason I don't want to sleep like a baby is that their bowels are NOT diurnal which generally results in them shitting themselves nightly.  I don't have much dignity left after 3 pregnancies, 3 labors, and 3 recoveries but luckily that is one area my dignity is firmly intact and I hope to keep it that way as long as I possibly can.



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