Sleeping habits

My husband used to be a very light sleeper. If I sneezed, he woke up. If I rolled over, he woke up. Sometimes, I think he even woke himself up snoring.

I, on the other hand, was a very deep sleeper. I would set 1500 alarm clocks in hopes that I might hear one of them after they were blaring in my ear for 30 minutes. In college, I would use my cell phone alarm as one of the many, and I would set in on vibrate. I would go to sleep with the cell phone snuggly tugged in the waistband of my pajamas. I would hopehopehope that I would hear or feel something, and I would wake up in time for whatever I had on my schedule that day. My room-mates loved it, I know! After sleeping through the multitudes of alarms once and missing a lab exam in college, I even started having my mom call me to wake me up if I had something very important to do that day. She was too nice. (Aila, if you try that one on me, I will laugh....really HARD in your adorable face!)

When we got married, Dave developed a condition known as SLSD, also known as selective light sleeping disorder. It was amazing, really. On days that I had to be up early, he would not hear my alarm at all, but on days that I should have turned the alarms off...and forgot to...he would wake instantly (and unhappily!)

It was marital bliss....if by marital bliss you mean just another one of those things you really hate about each other, but you have to just get.over.it!

Then, one day....one moment in time, everything changed. At 16 minutes after midnight on November 20, 2007, our sleeping habits changed.

I became a light sleeper; it was amazing, really, how quickly it changed. If this new bundle of joy breathed irregularly, I would wake from 3 rooms away and rush to her side to assess the situation.

Dave, became a deep sleeper. What? you might ask. How does that happen? What is this phenomenon I speak of? Well, I am still searching for the answer to that question, and I will be happy to notify you of my findings when, and if, I every figure anything out, and-more importantly- if I figure out how to reverse it!

Suddenly, he could sleep through the sound of an 18 wheeler barreling through our living room. At first, I thought he would recover from his lack of sleep the night that Aila was born, and he would go back to the old wake-at-the-sound-of-a-feather-falling man I had once known. Sadly, I was mistaken.


In the first few weeks, I would set an alarm to wake up every 2 and 1/2 hours to nurse the baby, and he wouldn't hear me. If I wanted his help, I would have to wake him myself. I was too proud for that (for the most part). Don't get me wrong, he would have been happy to help...he just didn't know what was going on outside of the Serta.

So- I powered through...


Lately, Aila has been waking at around 3:30 am. She doesn't need to eat, I know. She would be perfectly happy if I would just give in and rock her, but I won't. (I'm sorry, baby, I need my sleep, too.) Not to mention, I want her to learn that she can go back to sleep on her own. A couple of times about 10 minutes in to the 15 minute crying session at 3:30 in the morning, Dave would shoot out of bed to rescue her. It was as though he had just heard her and had to get to her right that second. I would grab his arm and say, "She's been crying for about 10 minutes, she'll quit soon. Just let her be." He would just look at me, and fall back to sleep....in about 3 milliseconds.

So, last night I was sleeping fitfully due to a terrible cold (the kind where your nose runs like a faucet). I was already awake when I heard Aila starting to cry around 3:45. I listened to her for about 5 minutes, and then Dave shot out of bed like a cannon. I almost grabbed his arm to tell him to just go back to sleep, but then I thought, "just let him go...maybe if she quits crying you can get some sleep...if he wants to deal with it, fine."

Well...45 minutes later, I was up rocking the baby. Bless his heart, he tried, but what a night... It really is a good thing that he's so darn loveable!

I think, if we are ever so blessed as to have another child, I might request that its cries sound like a bomb exploding (only to Dave, of course).