Sleep, or lack of, is one of those elusive aspects of parenthood that well-meaning friends and relatives try to explain, but you don’t fully grasp until you’re too tired to remember who told you about it.
Everyone knows having a baby means less sleep; your body even starts preparing for it by making you get up in the night to go to the toilet, but nothing prepares you for the grim reality broken sleep becomes with a newborn.
Noah didn’t sleep properly for the first six weeks of his life. During that time I felt like I was just lurching from one motherly duty to another, not doing anything properly and just surviving on the little sleep I was catching at night (I could never sleep during the day). I found it hard to put sentences together because I was so tired, and I feel enormous sympathy for new mums when I see them struggling to do the same.
While not much of an issue for us anymore, as Noah and Ethan sleep quite well now, lack of sleep has reared its ugly head recently and it has really knocked us about. Moving house is supposed to be one of the most stressful situations you can go through and I tend to agree this time. This move has been more stressful than others because of the logistics of getting the contents of a three-bedroom house, two children, two cats, a dog, a car and us to Tasmania. There has been the odd stressful conversation between Harvey and I here and there but it’s been mostly OK.
Except for Ethan. He hasn’t slept properly for the past two weeks, especially the past five nights when we stayed at my mum’s because our home was empty. The poor bub is exhausted and his little body is so tired and stressed he keeps breaking out in hives. But his entire life has just been picked up from around him and sent away. Everything he knows is gone, except for his family, and he’s having trouble sleeping trying to make sense of it all.
I’m hoping by the time I write next week his sleep patterns – and his hives – have settled down, because he’ll have his own bed back again and new surroundings to explore.
Wish us luck!
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Johanna Baker-Dowdell is mum to two boys – Noah and Ethan – and combines looking after them with her work as a blogger, journalist, writer and public relations consultant. She owns and manages Strawberry Communications which started small in the third bedroom, but has grown into its own office space (in the converted garage).
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