Life with a Newborn: Elf Gifs Edition

It's 5:34 am.  My baby is asleep, but not for much longer. He's due to wake for another bottle any minute.  

So why am I awake?  Surely, by my third baby, I'd know to sleep when the baby sleeps, especially at night.  Except: does this actually work for most people?  

Especially in these early newborn days.  I mean, baby is eating every three hours.  By the time I've fed him, changed him, burped him, and gotten him back to sleep, we're already at least an hour and fifteen minutes into that three hours.  Then I need to get myself back in bed and asleep, and I have never, ever, ever been someone who can fall asleep at the drop of a hat.  So usually, by the time I fall back asleep, I might have an hour before the baby wakes up again.  

Anxiety and slight panic kick in.  I am not Buddy.

I'm more of a needs-a-solid-ten-hours-to-function kind of gal. 

Friends, sleeping in hour-long segments is a recipe for this musicologist to rapidly lose her mind.  And that's assuming I actually fall asleep.  Because then there are nights like tonight, when instead of falling asleep, I lie in bed and obsess over course planning for the upcoming semester, or research I should be doing, or re-writes I should be re-writing...and before I know it, I hear the rustling coming from the crib next to me that tells me I've missed my window of sleep.

Teeny man will wake up soon enough.  His grunting and rustling will go from cute to full-on velociraptor-style screaming for food in an instant. I'll get a bottle ready, but not fast enough. Never fast enough. 

Once the bottle is ready, I'll get him from his crib.

The cycle will begin anew.  Coffee and/or Diet Coke will help me function enough to do what needs to get done, but will also prevent me from sneaking a morning nap when the baby sleeps.

It's my third baby.  I know that the nights are long, but the years are short.  I know this phase will pass.  I know all the cliches, and I look at my first-born and understand the truth in those cliches.  But I'm still in the messy middle, the haze of exhaustion.  Life with a newborn is a complicated muddle of emotions, and I'm struggling, on 2 hours of sleep, to find the words to describe it. 

(Hopefully by the time I'm writing my comprehensive exams in the spring I'm able to manage to put together more than two hours of sleep at a time.) 

Am I tired?  Yes.  Does I feel frustrated?  Certainly.  Do I occasionally cry in the kitchen while I make yet another middle-of-the-night bottle?  For sure.  But here's the thing about life with a newborn.  You feel all those things and more.  But then you look at your little one's chubby baby cheeks, or smell his tiny head as it rests on your shoulder, and something else bubbles up to the surface.

Love. It doesn't erase the anxiety, frustration, or exhaustion.  It acknowledges all of that, because love isn't warm fuzzy feelings.  It's making a bottle when you want to hide under the covers.  It's rocking a gassy baby when you desperately need to pee.  It's finishing a blog post, because he's finally woken up and needs you.  Again.