There is a clock in Luke’s nursery and everyday Shawn and I do a run-down of the numbers.
“I was up with him from 1:00 a.m. to 2:00, and then again from 4:00 to 5:30.
“Why so long?”
“We had a false start at 4:45 and had to start all over again.
“Ooh. Those are frustrating.”
“Yep. Was that it?”
“No. I got up and changed his diaper around 3:00.”
“Right. I forgot about that.”
Why do we do this? you ask. Good question. Keeping track of how little sleep you’re getting is just short of masochistic.
The thing is, Shawn and I are scientists at heart, and we take some sort of inane comfort from collecting data. We research, hypothesize, test, and retest. We read volumes on napping strategies and the Mozart Effect (because leading experts say Mozart makes babies smarter). We methodically change one variable at a time and study the effects. Don’t accuse me of raising my child like a lab rat. I’m not keeping him in a cage with cedar shavings or anything. The crux of it is this: parenting is hard and you look for little ways to make it easier. For us, we hunt for statistically significant data in vain hopes that we might be able to define The Process, such as it is.
Don’t even ask me about the spit-up log. You don’t want to know.
But every now and then, you come across encouraging data, and that can raise your hopes and keep you going.
In wee hours of this morning, Luke began stirring in his crib. These noises, we know, due to 102 nights of empirical data harvesting, are the precursors to the “I’m awake! Come get me!” cry.
“Shawn, did you look at the clock?”
“Yes.”
“It’s 5:00 a.m.”
“Yes.”
“What time did you put him down?”
“11:00 p.m.”
“Have you been up yet?”
“No. You?”
“No.”
“Six hours.”
“Six hours.”
This has happened before. I can count the number of times on one hand and still have left over fingers, but it has happened before and I can recall each instance exactly, along with the accompanied elation that I imagine only the care-takers of young children can truly appreciate.
The official pediatric definition of “Sleeping Through The Night” is 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep. We have not yet acquired the necessary number of instances for me to say, with any statistical significance, that our child is “Sleeping Through The Night.” The mean of our bell-curve still sits resolutely at 2 hours (and that is operating on the assumption that anything in the child-rearing process can be considered “normal,” even a data distribution curve).
We can say merely that he has “Slept Through The Night” before and that the increasing frequency of such events in the data in comparison to our n points in an encouraging direction.
I’ll take a little encouragement where I can get it.