In which I talk about sleep deprivation

Juice and I were so fortunate with Peanut. She was such a good baby, and when we realized that the whole getting up every three hours to feed her was just some fucked up thing people who have crabby babies came up with to torture those of us who have non-crabby babies, we were fine. That happened when she was two weeks old, and throughout her first few months, we were very happy. She slept through the night right away once we figured out the scam, and we went on with our lives.

I am now a firm believer in babies being on a schedule. We've seen literature recently that says to just let them eat when they want to eat, and do what they want to do, and if they want to steal your car when they're three months old, and smoke crack, then you should just let them do that because if you try to control you kids' lives in any way, they'll turn into responsible, productive citizens of society, and we can't have any of THAT happening.

And if you can't tell from my random babbling, I'm running on not a whole lot of sleep this week.

Yesterday, Peach woke up at 3 AM, which has been typical since we got her home, but then once she had eaten, decided it was party time. Juice let me sleep in since I'd been up with her the night before, but when she came in at 7:30 still trying to get Peach to settle down (and crying herself), I had to step in.

Juice has been really good about breastfeeding Peach. With Peanut, she really struggled to produce enough milk, and we ended up supplementing with formula a lot, which I think helped Peanut sleep through the night. Right now, we have a regular dairy farm in our refrigerator. Juice has enough excess milk for 2-3 days of feedings, but instead of using the excess at night, she's been breastfeeding, which takes longer, and since breast milk is thinner than formula, babies need to be fed more often.

Yesterday, we decided two things: 1) we needed to keep Peach awake in the evening after we ate dinner, and not let her sleep too long and 2) we were going to bottle feed her at night, and supplement her with a little bit of formula right before we went to bed.

The result (and God, I hope I'm not jinxing this by putting it in writing): 6 glorious hours of uninterrupted sleep last night. We went to bed before Letterman was done, and woke up as Good Morning San Antonio was starting.

We've been supplementing ourselves by napping when the kids are napping during the day, so we're not going stark raving mad, but I hope that this overnight thing keeps up, especially since I start back to work next week. It's only for a week, then I'm off again for two weeks, but it's going to be hard to adjust for both of us.