Mama in the City

If you have been reading this blog since the beginning, you will know that sleep did not come easily for Ben and we were put through the hoops the first 14 months. I now know that sleeping in increments of 45 minutes and up to 2 hours, may work for Ben but does not work for me. During Ben's first year I constantly felt ragged and easily stressed. I thought about sleep all the time and would plot my day around coffee and opportunities to sit down.

I started worrying that something must be wrong with my baby and so I obsessed about infant sleep and read many different books with different opinions from mothers, medical professionals and so on. I scoured websites and blogs and used google like it was my personal reference section on infant sleep. My body constantly ached from not getting enough REM sleep, I felt frustrated and was beyond exhausted.

I now believe that joy and happiness is directly related to the amount and quality of sleep that you get. Sleep is a vital event we all need in order to live well, and so many people have issues with getting enough! Maybe you have your own case of insomnia, or a snoring bed partner waking you up, we all want more sleep! The topic of sleep easily dominates our lives on a day to day level. If you have recently been fortunate enough to have had a good afternoon nap or a really great nights sleep, than you know that this is true! Sleep rules!

Your love and desire of sleep grows exponentially when you haven't clocked in enough hours in a row. You may become obsessed with googling terms like, baby not sleeping through the night' or 'frequent night wakings ?'. It is beyond challenging and exhausting when someone else is calling the shots about when you can sleep and controlling the amount of REM your able to catch. Night time wake ups are painful and a part of parenting life that can be rough.

Whether you are a believer in Ferber's 'Cry It Out' method or you prefer other gentle approaches to babies sleep, we are ALL in the same boat when it comes to being parents. We just want our children to sleep soundly, because we too really really want to sleep. It is easy to become consumed with thinking and wishing you had more minutes to sleep. It may turn out that even when your wee one is sleeping through the night, you will then become sleep greedy and start wishing you could sleep past 6 AM, it turns out that it will always be something!


Sleeping in the afternoon on a car ride to Vancouver Island.

So, tell me who has been keeping you up at night? Do you have some great tricks to share? On that note, I'm heading to bed early tonight!



A blissful afternoon nap