All changed, changed utterly

The Dad Diary
Edwin McGreal

I fell into a conversation with a friend recently who lamented that he was not giving himself eight hours sleep a night and how he needed to correct it. He got no pity from me.
Parents everywhere can identify with those friends of theirs who bemoan problems you’d love to have. Not getting eight hours sleep, no free time, under too much pressure etc, etc.
They might be telling you this after a weekend at Electric Picnic, a two-day wedding celebration or a full weekend in Dublin for a Mayo game. They don’t know how good they have it.
That they might be telling you this after you’ve had four hours sleep or you’ve had to move heaven and earth to get to the same wedding for a few hours (and you can forget all about the afters the next day) only adds to the rolling of your eyes.
They don’t know what they don’t know. As parents, we have to admit we had similar thought processes before the kids came along.
Kids change everything. Your life is not your own anymore. Not just in terms of being able to go and do things that you used to be able to do before the kids came along – even the basic things, like getting the eight hours that my friend reckons he needed, are distant memories.
There are nights we might go to bed early and really, really need the eight-hour shuteye. Getting that holy grail is another matter.
Frankie usually always obliges, sleeping around eleven hours a night solid, and I can count on one hand the amount of times we have had to go into her during the night in two years.
Éamon, however, is another story. After a lot of work – and a fair bit of cursing – we finally got him used to going to sleep on his own at night.
But gone for the night he is not. After a few great weeks, he has taken to waking several times a night again. Usually, he will go back once you go into him and give him his soother, which he has inevitably managed to toss to the other end of the bed. If he was a bit older, you would nearly think he was doing it on purpose.
Trouble is, while he goes straight back to sleep, you might not. And some nights, as soon as you are back, he wakes again. One night he was awake every half hour, like clockwork. The next night, it was every hour. That’s what we are supposed to call progress, I suppose.
And then the guessing games start. Is he too hot? Too cold? Is he teething? Are his pyjamas irritating him? Did he eat enough during the day? Has he wind?
If only he could tell you. After a tortuous process of elimination, we settled on teething being the issue. Which ought to mean it will only be a short-term problem. We hope.
In the meantime, eight hours sleep is but a dream.

In his fortnightly column, Edwin McGreal charts the ups and downs of the biggest wake-up call of his life: parenthood.