One Month of Sleepless Nights

One month ago today, Owen was born. It's a bit hard for us to believe that he's already a month old (and not one of those short months, but a full 31 days), but it's also hard to remember what life was like without him (of course that might be due to the memory loss associated with sleep deprivation). One hazy memory I do have from those days before Owen arrived were glorious nights sleeping for seven, eight, sometimes even nine hours in a row. Now for Elaine, those are even more distant memories as the pressure Owen put on her bladder prevented a full night's sleep long before his crying ever did.

In the months leading up to Owen's birth, the one part of being a new parent that terrified me the most was the lack of sleep associated with having a newborn. The prospect of mountains of diapers didn't particularly phase me, and the endless hours of breast feeding were and are a challenge that I am particularly unsuited to help with, but the idea of not getting my precious eight hours of sleep left me shaking in my shoes. Some of our friends with kids would tell us almost nonchalantly how little sleep they got the first few months, and I would wonder if their calmness about it all was a ploy to trick more people into joining them in the ranks of the breeders, or if the lack of sleep they experienced actually prevented them from forming any long term memories about just how bad it was.

Now that we're a month into this parenthood experience, it's time to face my fear, and look back on a month of sleepless nights. For various reasons, we've been a bit obsessive about tracking Owen's sleeping habits (when two economists have a baby, they're bound to collect some data;-). The chart below is a visual representation of Owen's sleep patterns to date. The blue areas represent periods of sleep, and the yellow areas are times when he is awake.


It looks like a lot of work, but thanks to a wonderful web application called the TrixieTracker (which grew out of great blog called the The Trixie Update), it's actually incredibly easy to keep track of Owen's every move. What have we learned from all this data? So far, mostly that Owen's sleep pattern looks pretty random, but there are a few encouraging bits of information buried in the data. He's been sleeping about 11 hours a day, and thankfully his naps last longer during the night than they do during the day. If we ignore all the really short naps that don't give us parents enough time to do anything, his real naps during the day average a little less than 90 minutes, and at night they tend to last a little over two hours. On eight separate blissful occasions, he's slept for about four hours in a single stretch at night; but there have been 31 times where he's fallen asleep at night and been back up within half an hour. Despite all of our attempts, we haven't yet been able find any ways to influence whether he'll sleep well at night or not.

How has reality stacked up against my initial fears? Well, I think I'm doing all right. The first few weeks were a little rough, but adrenaline and afternoon naps help out quite a bit. Now that I'm back at work, Elaine has been absolutely wonderful and taken over all the changing and calming duties in the middle of the night on work days. I try to return the favor on weekends changing him in the middle of the night and taking him downstairs early in the morning so Elaine can sleep in, but she still has to get up to nurse, so there is only so much I can do.

Hopefully, before too long we'll start to see some patterns develop in the data, and when we start to have some influence on when he goes to sleep, having the data will be great for managing transitions in bed times and nap times. In a few months we might start to see Owen sleeping through the night, and eventually developing a stable nap pattern. Until then, we'll keep on tracking, and dreaming of the night when we can dream again.