Wakeful sleep

Now that we've successfully muddled through three full weeks since bringing Jonathan home from the hospital, I'm starting to feel deeply entrenched in that "dazed and confused" stage that accompanies chronic sleep deprivation. As I mentioned previously, Jonathan is a pretty good sport about going to sleep after his middle-of-the-night feeding sessions, but he still gets up to eat every 3-4 hours. It takes an hour to feed him, more or less, so at most I'm sleeping three hours at a time, and I usually total about six hours of sleep. This is most distressing for a sleep lover like myself who is biologically programmed to need nine hours.

Once I finish feeding Jonathan, Jeremy gets up to burp him and rock him to sleep. Jeremy prefers that I wake him on the half hour so he has a better chance of seeing an entire show on late-night PBS. We recently started getting PBS's digital over-the-air programming, which means we have five PBS channels from which to choose. I tease Jeremy because Jonathan is usually burped and asleep within 10 or 15 minutes, but Jeremy usually doesn't come back to bed for at least a full half hour. Yesterday at around 5:00 a.m. I asked Jeremy if Jonathan had been difficult to get to sleep after his 2:00 a.m. feeding, since it took Jeremy longer than usual to come back to bed. He said that Jonathan was asleep relatively quickly, but that PBS had been airing a segment of the "Garden Story" series, which, as a student of urban environments, scratched Jeremy right where he itched. When I laughed at him for sacrificing sleep for PBS, he just reiterated the keen watchability of "Garden Story" and said, "Rach, I had to be there."