Episode 6 - Sleep? What is this sleep?

I was speaking with a friend of a friend the other day. She calmly related to me that her five and a half month old baby girl hasn’t slept more than two hours in a row since she was born.

Let’s take a moment to reflect on this statement. If baby hasn’t slept more than two hours, her breast-feeding mummy wouldn’t have had more that that either. That’s almost six months of near-complete sleep deprivation.

The record for the longest period without sleep is 18 days, 21 hours, 40 minutes during a rocking chair marathon. The record holder reported hallucinations, paranoia, blurred vision, slurred speech and memory and concentration lapses.

This woman has admittedly had small periods of sleep over the last six months, but compared to a normal, functioning human, she’s well below the norm. So how do you say politely, “Umm, so have you been experiencing many hallucinations lately?” Instead I just asked her, “How do you do it?”

“Oh,” she replied serenely, “I just do.”

A new baby typically results in 400-750 hours lost sleep for parents in the first year. That is such a scary figure, I can barely wrap my head around it. And apparently, seventeen hours of sustained wakefulness leads to a decrease in performance equivalent to a blood alcohol-level of 0.05%. So forget about having that glass of wine in the evening mummy: according to stats, you’re already drunk.

Sleep is something you can only truly appreciate once you’ve lost it for a stretch. I know I’ve had my sleepless nights, but luckily my boys are both excellent sleepers otherwise I don't know if I could survive, let alone work full time. My next door neighbour’s child is almost three and still hasn’t slept through the night. How her poor mother hasn’t boxed her up and mailed her off to Finland yet, I’ll never know.

So what makes the difference with kids? How come some mothers are barely functioning, slurring their way through the day with tomato eyes, while other mummies merrily slip boasts into their conversations like, “Oh my kids have all been sleeping through the night since they were five days old.”
I honestly can’t tell you. Part of it seems to be lucky dip: some kids simply sleep better than others. I know parents who swear by routines lifted from baby sleep books. And my own mother used to dose us with Phenergan occasionally. (Don’t worry, it didn’t eefect mi et al.)

Whatever the answer, the next time you speak with a mother of a child under twelve months, forgive her if she squints and forgets your name (or her own) and bear in mind that she is quite possibly seeing you as a giant talking sheep and wondering what your wool tastes like.