Sleeping and feeling utterly selfish

Little Danger Cool now seems to have found his routine at 8 weeks old. Unfortunately it’s a routine that is earth shatteringly exhausting. Most of the day he either wants holding or a nice sleep and most of the night he feeds like some sort of glutton that cannot possibly ever be sated.

He’s been ill recently and this has meant we’ve been restricted to feeding him a couple of ounces at a time. I never knew but apparently if you fill a babies tummy it pushes up against their lungs and squeezes them a bit, something that you definitely shouldn’t do if they’ve a bronchial infection as it means they have trouble getting enough air to breath.

Of course by earth shatteringly exhausting, I mean it’s more or less earth shatteringly exhausting for wifey and not for me. 5 nights of the week I roll over onto the side I’m slightly deaf on (Megadeth, Manchester Apollo, 1995ish is to blame for this) and drop off back to sleep. The guilt is starting to get to me although not as much as the lack of sleep would. I try to do the last feed of the evening and the first one of the morning most weeknights, so that’s 10pm-ish and around 6 in the morning but unless there’s a special cry for help I try to sleep through the rest.

There is of course a good reason for this, but it doesn’t stop me feeling like the worlds most selfish Dad at times, especially when the baby has a bad night. There are peaks and troughs in how busy I am at work and unfortunately February through to May are my busiest months. I work in audit, in a managerial position planning and reviewing work. A lot of it is client facing and the buck often stops with me. So as well as working hard, I need a lot of attention to detail, something that has never been my strong point, when I get a good nights sleep and is all the much harder when over tired!

Fortunately I am blessed with an extraordinary wife- in terms of understanding and sheer endurance, and she does all the night time feeds during the week without a word of complaint. I try to be my bit at the weekend, we often swap sides of the bed so I sit sleep next to the cot and on a few occasions I’ve taken Danger downstairs and kipped on the sofa. The thing I find the most irritating is Danger has a feed at around 5.30/6am and then goes into a really deep sleep, about ten minutes before Fifi bounds into my life for the day, full of extravagant enthusiasm for the day ahead.

I try not to be grumpy :)

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