Sleep

Jolyon usually sleeps in 3-hour stretches at night, with each waking followed by nursing on one side, then a diaper change (which wakes him from the food coma), then nursing on the other side, then I re-swaddle him and put him back in the crib. He usually goes right back to sleep, sometimes with a little swaying back and forth first. If he's really awake, I just take him to bed with me, as he will fuss in the crib but is quite content if snuggled so I can go back to sleep. Since he's in the same room, I can hear subtle waking-up noises and he doesn't get a chance to get upset with hunger. One of my favorite things is waking up to see him happy and awake and looking around in his crib, then getting really excited when he realizes I'm about to feed him.

Sometimes he sleeps for longer periods of time - 4, 5, or occasionally 6 hours. Last night was one of the 6-hour sleep sessions, and while this seems like a great thing in theory, it actually results in my getting less sleep. The unfortunate side of waking up easily to his noises is that he also makes noises in his sleep, so starting at hour 3, I wake up every hour to Jolyon sleep-noises, thinking he's probably awake and wanting to eat, only finding him still asleep. Un-swaddling him and bringing hm to nurse doesn't even wake him up (if he's really asleep, he doesn't wake up for anything, not even The Boob), so I just go back to sleep and wait for him to really wake up. Last night I woke up 3 or 4 times this way. I'm a really light sleeper - we can't leave the heat on in our apartment in the winter, because the noise wakes me up. I slept through banging radiators just fine for 22 years, but the forced-air heating coming on in our current bedroom wakes me up every time. Outside noise I seem to tune out, but if there's a noise in our bedroom, my brain decides it needs investigation and wakes up. This combined with the post-partum hormones keeps me checking on all Jolyon's noises. But in general I've been getting enough sleep - if I keep going back to sleep enough times, I'm rested by morning. Jenny, who can sleep through a fire drill and middle-of-the-night breastfeeding, gets up with him in the morning so I can sleep more if I'm still tired.