To sleep, perchance to SCREAM

I need brains! More BRAINS! BRAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIINS!

Well, it seems like the good times are over – for the time being, at least. After having been an incredibly good sleeper for the past eight weeks or so, Milo has decided to revert to his “Night of the Living Dead” style of sleeping. The “Living Dead” being me, of course.

Until just a couple nights ago, Milo’s nighttime schedule looked like this: going to bed around 8:00 p.m. with nary a fuss, being given a “dream feed” at 11:00 p.m. while still asleep, waking up for a quick feed around 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., and then drifting right back into slumber land and staying there until waking for good sometime between 7:00 or 8:00 a.m. The only time his schedule deviated was when he actually slept through the night (the Holy Grail of parenting) instead of waking up for the 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. feed – and this he did at least once every couple of weeks.

Yes, he was a good little sleeper, and boy, did I ever exult over the fact. Whenever someone would inquire about his sleeping habits, I’d positively gloat.

“Oh, he’s a great sleeper,” I’d breezily announce to the person who asked (as well as anyone else within earshot), “Goes down like a charm, wakes up only once in the night – if that – and goes right back to sleep as soon as he’s done feeding. Just a dream, really.”

Well, the dream has become a nightmare. For the past couple of nights, he’s taken to waking up about shortly after he’s been put down for the night and refusing to go back to sleep for the next hour or so. Then he’s awakened on both nights around 10:30 p.m. (before I can give him his 11:00 “dream feed”), then again at 1:30 a.m., and then again at 4:30 a.m.

And then this morning, he decided to wake up at 5:00 a.m. AND 6:00 a.m. as well, waiting just until I’d finally fallen back asleep from the previous wake-up before shattering my dreams with another one of his high-pitched “Hey! HEY! WhereamIandwhatthehellamIdoing
aloneinhereandwhat’sthisfunnyfeelinginmybellyandwhyisn’t
someonecomingtohelpmeHelpMeHELPME!!!” hollers.

I swear, the only thing that’s kept me from throttling the little devil is a book that one of the women in my “Parent & Baby” class recently lent me. It’s called The Wonder Weeks and it’s all about the eight main stages of mental development babies experience during their first 60 weeks of life, and how these intellectual leaps make babies act all wonky as they try to make sense of their rapidly changing reality. Well, wouldn’t you know, Milo just happens to be going through one of them right this very week. Hence his incredible wonkiness.

According to the book, when babies are about 12 weeks old (or 14 weeks, if they were born two weeks early like Milo was), they start being able to comprehend “smooth transitions” – continuous changes in sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. All of a sudden, nothing in their world seems to stand still any more.

For the first time, they’re able to watch an object move from one place to another, such as a ball rolling across the floor, or their hands waving in front of their eyes, or their zombie moms crossing the kitchen to pour themselves a cup of coffee before they realize in their sleep-deprived state that they CAN’T drink coffee because they’re breast-feeding, and if their child is already acting like a miniature Linda Blair, peeing and puking and shrieking demonically, heaven only knows what he or she would be like all jacked up on caffeine – so no, they couldn’t even possibly consider drinking coffee even though they’ve never needed a hit of that sweet, sweet java SO VERY MUCH in their whole damned lives!

But I digress. The point is, at this stage of the game, babies are suddenly able to make a lot more sense of the world around them and it totally blows their tiny little minds, so much so that they become a lot fussier and more clingy and, if they’re Milo, unable to sleep for longer than a couple of hours or so.

So I can’t blame the boy for his disrupted sleep patterns over the past couple of nights. Being a newborn has to be like the craziest acid trip EVER. The kind of intellectual leap he’s currently experiencing must be like seeing our three-dimensional reality suddenly sprout another dimension. Heck, I’d be freaked out, too.

Thankfully, the authors of The Wonder Weeks say this rocky period of transition usually only lasts a few days, so I’m hoping that Milo will return to his old, champion sleeper self by the end of the week. After all, a couple of Dutch doctors who’ve spent 25 years studying infant development can’t be wrong, right? Right? Right?

If they are, I’m going to trash-talk their book like you wouldn’t believe.