Sleep is for Wimps. Healthy,well-rested wimps, but wimps nonetheless

Don’t you wish you could sleep like that?

Everyone keeps warning us that when the baby comes, we’ll never sleep again. Dire predictions of a sleep deprivation so bad we’ll go out of our minds with exhaustion, clawing our eyes out in a desperate hope to get just one hour of sleep.

Clearly, these people have forgotten what pregnant sleep looks like.

Tomorrow marks the beginning of Week 33. Last night was a pretty typical night:

11:45 pm: Bed time! Ben is off work this week, so our schedule has gotten a little more lax. It took me about 15-20 minutes to actually fall asleep, which has been my pattern my whole life, so nothing new there.

Somewhere between midnight and 2: I woke up to roll onto my other side. See, the belly is now big enough that I can’t just roll over in my sleep anymore. If I try to roll using my ab muscles, I pull something in my side. So I actually have to wake up to roll over at night. Out of sheer determination, I kept my eyes closed and refused to look at the clock.

2:45 am: I have to pee. I lie in bed for about 5 minutes, arguing with myself if I actually do have to get up, because for the first time in a while, I’m actually comfortable. My bladder gets insistent enough that my whole abdomen starts aching. I give up and get up.

3:00 am: I’ve been back in bed for a while, but can’t get back to sleep. I can’t find that comfy position again, and now my nausea/heartburn is acting up, so if I lie wrong, I can feel the stomach acid start crawling up my throat. After tossing and turning to find a comfortable position (and failing), I take a chewable Papaya Enzyme tablet and worry about the damage I’m doing to my teeth. I definitely saw the clock hit 3:15 before I fell back to sleep.

Somewhere between 3 and 6: I roll over again. Same deal as before.

6:45 am: I get a text message from a friend in California who forgot about time zone differences. It’s okay, though because the pic she sends makes me unreasonably happy. Also, I send my reply at 10am here, which totally sounds like revenge to me. After I look at my phone, Lilit sees that I have an eye open, and makes a frog noise followed by rolling on her back. Great. 7am and she wants to play. Yeah, that’s not happening. I take advantage of already being awake to hit the bathroom again, and on my way back to bed, I tell Lilit to go back to sleep. She meows like a normal cat once, then lets me rest.

9:00 am: I had put a reminder in my calendar that library books are due today. Only I set it up as an appointment instead of a reminder, so my phone alerts me. Ben and I give up on the night (as my stomach starts grumbling and growling) and head downstairs to make breakfast.
Look, I’m not saying I don’t realize that I can get more hours in a row now than I will with a three day old infant. But there are a couple of huge differences between now and then. First, when we have a three day old, we will not have a to do list or a schedule of things to accomplish during waking hours. We will be able to take one hour naps at any point during the day that she lets us, so even if it takes 14 hours to do it, we can guarantee a solid 8 hours of sleep a day. (I said solid, not uninterrupted. I’m not a fool, after all). Second, I’ll actually be able to lie down in bed. Or on my side. Or on my back. Third, and this really is the most important part, we’ll have something adorable and new to look at when we’re lying there, exhausted and bored. I mean seriously, it’s going to take a while for “Look at how tiny her hands are!” to get old.

Besides, what choice do we have? It’s a little late to turn back now.