My daughter turned 7 months old yesterday (where has the time gone?!) Last night was a major milestone – it was the first time that she slept through the night. Hallelujah!!! I am tempted to pop a bottle of bubbly right now and start my day off with a mimosa – but unfortunately alcohol sounds terrible. Allow me to explain. I hadn’t been drinking much for the month of April (see my No Fools This April post). On Wednesday night we had friends over and I plowed through 3/4 of a bottle of delicious red wine. It was delightful. But Thursday sucked. I had a hangover pretty much the entire day, and somehow managed to throw out my back . . . but that’s something for another post. Last night I had book club, and got a flight of 4 very heavy duty beers. They were delicious but I was definitely buzzed and perhaps a shade drunk. Now that it’s Friday morning I am very ready for a detox day. Perhaps I will take an hour for myself and go get a Frappuccino today at some point though since this milestone very much calls for celebrating!

Baby Jackie on the day she was born

Our first daughter was (and often still is) a handful during the day, but she was almost always a good sleeper. She could be difficult to get down, and tiny noises could wake her up as you were trying to leave the room, but for the most part once she was down, she was down. Our second daughter, Jackie, is the opposite in almost every way. She is so easy during the day and she goes down without much fuss. However, during her first four months she had been waking up every two hours and sometimes every hour during the second half of the night. It was brutal. Very brutal. Even though I would tell myself “this is just a phase, and this is the last time you will ever have to deal with this,” I still thought I might spontaneously combust in rage flames or pass out from exhaustion and hit my head and die and be happy to never wake up. After about five months she got into a routine of waking two to three times a night. Not perfect, but oh so much better than before!

My husband is a nurse and works nights so I often have to do all the feedings at night. But when he is home we try to split the feedings. Once Jackie was only waking two or three times a night we could each get a solid chunk of sleep. I almost wrote uninterrupted sleep, but that’s actually not true for me. If Jackie wakes up, I wake up. When it’s my husband’s turn to feed, I have to wake him up to let him know. But at least I get to go right back to sleep. If my body lets me. Sometimes I get insomnia and if I get woken up from a deep sleep I can’t go back to sleep at all. It typically comes in waves but whenever it hits it is beyond depressing. And yes, some of these waves of insomnia happened during the last seven months. It is one of the great mysteries of my life that I could be so sleep deprived, so utterly, completely and desperately tired, and yet I could still get a bout of insomnia. But I digress.

This post is a celebration of the fact that our entire family got to sleep through the night! My husband and I re-watched the last episode of Game of Thrones so we didn’t get to bed until about 10. I always read myself to sleep so I probably actually fell asleep around 10:30. Normally Jackie will wake up around 11 and then again at 4. But last night she didn’t wake up at all until 4:45!! It was pretty amazing. I am a little annoyed however because my husband’s cell phone has been doing this thing the last few nights where it buzzes when the battery is low or something? He sleeps right through it but it wakes me up. Well, it happened again last night at around 4:00 so I had to get up and try and find the phone to get it to shut the fuck up. Since Jackie hadn’t woken up to feed at all I couldn’t go back to sleep because I kept thinking that she probably died. I was debating going in there to check for a pulse so I could try and go back to bed as long as I knew she was still alive. But then I figured it would probably wake her up if she hadn’t in fact died, so I just sat in bed debating what to do. I finally picked up my book and read until Jackie woke up at 4:45 for her feed. I was more than happy to get up at that point : )

A side note to this post is that recently I have been feeling like I just can’t get my shit together. I want to write more posts, but I can’t figure out when to do it. I also want to get in shape and exercise more, but I can’t figure out when to do that either. During the day when the girls are napping and I get my 1 hour (if I’m lucky) I like to be out in the garden now that the weather is nice. Or I like to try and clean because the house is always a disaster. So I decided that once Jackie starts sleeping through the night I will get up at 5 and either exercise, write, do yoga or do something that I haven’t been finding the time to do. And so here I am at 5:00 this morning writing a post about my daughter finally sleeping through the night.

It feels amazing.