Sleeping Arrangements

I’m an Interior Designer. Which means I had visions of my baby girl’s nursery from the second I found out I was pregnant. I worked on it for months, and loved every minute of it. Took me forever to decide on the perfect crib, and I had visions of us tucking her in at night (again with the idyllic visions).

Sleeping has been an issue from the beginning. I knew she would be in a bassinet in our room for at least a little while. So we tried it the first night home – and failed miserably. First of all, it wasn’t easy for me to get up and down after a C-section, so getting in and out of bed to feed her was no picnic. So we opted to sleep on the couch. And we ended up doing that for weeks.

Trying to calm Madison down in the early days was no easy feat. Majority of the time, she would fall asleep nursing. I was frightened to move her, so I would let her sleep on my chest. I had to get sleep somehow! Well, that turned into the only way she would sleep, which was horrible for me because I was constantly worried she would fall. So I never really got any true sleep.

I started really resenting her at that point. I’m sure it was due to the complete lack of sleep (and the out of whack hormones). I wanted so bad just to sleep on my side, in my own bed – was that too much to ask??

Now, at 8 weeks old, she is usually ok sleeping on her own. In her bassinet or in her swing (we keep both in our bedroom). There are still nights where she just won’t fall asleep anywhere else but on me – but they are becoming less and less.

We usually never got more than 4 hours sleep at a time (after about 4 weeks that is), but the other night she actually slept 7 hours straight! The next night she only slept 3, but hey, we’ll take what we can get!

First Days

As everyone knows, babies don’t come with instruction manuals. Sure, there are tons of books out there that are supposed to tell you everything you need to know. And we read all the standards religiously when I was pregnant – What to Expect, Baby 411, The Vaccine Book, and my husband’s favorite, Dad Labs. But nothing can prepare you for that first night, especially with a high needs baby.

We were on a fairly quiet floor of the maternity ward. That is until we arrived. Madison could be heard from just about anywhere. When most babies were sleeping off their traumatic experiences, she was wide awake and commanding our attention. “She has great lungs” they would tell us – I thought, “that’s a good thing, right?”.

My husband and I had absolutely no idea what we were doing. Everything we had read over the past 9 months had completely left my brain – I felt totally clueless. Thank goodness my Mom was here to help us out at 3 a.m. Otherwise I don’t think we would have slept at all.

But even through those first virtually sleepless days and nights, listening to my baby cry and trying to figure out what to do, I kept looking at her in awe. This was my little person to love forever – and she will test that love often.