Sleep isn't a life choice

What nobody tells you about having children is that it’s likely your first child is a sleeper agent. Sent from goodness knows where to lull you into a false sense of security. Really what they’re doing is paving the way for their sleep thieving sibling. Oh I was so smug before I had child 2. “My kid slept 12 hours from day 1.” Elise really did but if pre-Wynter me was to say that to post-Wynter me, I’d kick her in the fanny. Smug bitch. I both detest and envy pre Wynter Dannielle. I was the type of well-meaning fool who would give an exhausted mother advice on how to get her baby to sleep actually having had nil experience of struggling to do so. Elise was literally a dream baby. I mean at first it was because she was too jaundiced to wake up but you get my meaning.

Wynter has taught me the meaning of exhaustion.

Post Wynter 

Pre Wynter 

There have been nights I haven’t closed my eyes once because the only place she will sleep is on my chest, I’ve paced our bedroom floor during the early hours singing Time to say goodbye in Italian until I’m hoarse because she once fell asleep while the song played. I have cried countless tears thinking I’m such a bloody failure of a mother because after the hellish nights I don’t want to leave the house because I’m either too exhausted to or I’m completely unfit to drive. I’ve also snapped at my husband, friends and parents out of sheer frustration that once it gets dark my baby decides that she can’t abide me.

So now she co-sleeps. Which definitely wasn’t in my parenting plan, but my little Wynter is fierce and likes to stay in my bed. And there are some good nights, where she sleeps for more than an hour. There are some bad nights, after which the drive to work feels like the scene from Wolf of Wall Street where Leonardo Di Caprio drives after taking Quaaludes. I have a new level of appreciation for the times my husband manages to spend an entire night upstairs without the baby banishing him to the conservatory and I have a whole lot of gratitude for the friends and family that have offered cleaning and babysitting or just to listen to me moan.

I didn’t know it would be this fucking hard and I’d done it before! Oh, and my baby is called Wynter....in case you didn't get that.

Though she is but little she is fierce