Eve, December 2005
I just found this old article from the New Yorker by John Seabrook. It’s fairly long and it’s about the whole co-sleeping versus Ferberizing debate that new parents (myself included not so long ago) are obsessed by in the quest for more sleep, so you might not be interested in the whole thing (unless you’ve come here while trawling the internet at 4am desperately googling “how do I get my baby to sleep?!” in which case you might find it very useful). This paragraph brought me right back to those early months…it’s such a perfect description:
After four months of co-sleeping, the situation began to deteriorate. His polyphasic habits did not seem to be shifting toward our monophasic sleep. Instead, the opposite seemed to be happening: my formerly unified block of sleep was now broken into two parts, according to the baby’s schedule, but, unlike him, I couldn’t easily go back to sleep once I’d been awakened at 3 A.M., and spent the rest of the night in a hypnagogic state between sleep and wakefulness, with surreal images drifting across my unrested brain. Then his four-hour sleep phases shortened to two hours. Instead of sleeping in his crib until 2 A.M. and coming into our bed, he was coming in at midnight. He still seemed to be getting the sleep he needed, even if he wasn’t learning to do it by himself. My wife and I, however, were beginning to exhibit symptoms of sleep deprivation: the burning eyes; the band of fatigue that tightens around the skull, a sensation some liken to the feeling that you’re always wearing a hat; the irritation–at each other, at friends, at the cat’s water bowl, which I kept kicking by accident; and astereognosis, or the inability to recognize things by touch, which is a classic sign of sleep deprivation. There was a sense of growing distance between ourselves and the world. Did I go out this morning to get the Times, or was that yesterday morning? I glance at the weather report in the top right-hand corner of the front page, and it says “Interesting clouds.” Hmm. Interesting clouds. Never seen that forecast before. Then I realize it says “Increasing clouds.” But “Interesting clouds” made perfect sense.
Eve is sleeping peacefully in her cot right now and will do until about 7:30 tomorrow morning. There was a time when I would have paid a lot of money to know that she would ever do that.