Amnesia

Oscar, 2014

I've lost...well, what's a quarter of 44? 12 days of sleep? I am too tired to do the math.

Recovery is a strange business. I feel like I'm getting my strength back through training and Pilates, and I walk something like 4 miles a day, just running errands and walking to soothe the baby back to sleep. Oscar is so smiley and vocal now too. When he's not howling. The days are full...I have a heck of a lot more stamina than I did in my third trimester, but at the end of the day I feel like I've been in a boxing ring. Just physically (and emotionally) beat.

As the baby gets to be more of a baby (and less of a newborn), I'm also getting impatient for us to establish a schedule. So far, I feed Oscar on demand, and he sleeps when he sleeps, which is pretty much what I did with Axel.

Then magically, sometime around 4 months, Axel started sleeping through the night (with one dream feed at around 10 p.m.) and napping regularly. It was amazing. I felt like we were geniuses, who had produced a genius baby.

The trouble is, I have no memory of how we got to that point, or whether I did anything to help the process along. We never sleep trained or had to listen to him cry it out. It just kind of happened. And now, the second time around, I have zero intelligence on what to do next. As it is, some days, Oscar will sleep for 15 minutes out of every hour, leaving me just about no time at all to complete a thought. Other days, he'll sleep for five hours at a time. And he's ravenous about every two hours, round the clock.

I keep looking back through the blog, for clues. Apparently I was delirious back then too. If only Axel could tell us what made him turn the corner!