Cracking Up and Clamping Down

Sleep deprivation is one of the most effective forms of torture known to man.
99% of parents learn this frightening truth pretty early on.
The problem is, as time goes on, and your newborn starts to sleep through, you tend to un-learn this truth. Your expectations are raised. A night goes by, then two, then ten... and eventually you start expecting not to have uninterrupted sleep.

Mistake. For when your newborn - now metamorphized into a sturdy 4 & a half-month old - decides that uninterrupted sleep is no longer his thing... boy, oh boy, you are taken unawares.
It is oh so much harder to bear, believe me.
Pointless as it is, FH and I find ourselves seething at our twinkly-eyed baby, begging him to just please be quiet and sleep at 5 a.m.
He grins up at us and lets out an ear-piercing shriek that may be a sign of immense joy or immense frustration: it's pretty hard to tell in the 5 a.m. fog that's swirling around our heads.

When pleading fails, we turn to reasoning. An equally futile tactic, of course, but anything is worth a try at 5 a.m. on a winter's night.
Please just go to sleep, will you? It's not morning yet. See? It's only 5 a.m. Just another 2 hours, yes?
As though maybe our boy is so advanced, he can not only understand the notion of time, but agree to respect our agenda.

There is a lot of frustration and yes, some anger. Of course, all this anger is dissipated the next day, when we take our innocent-eyed baby into our arms for a cuddle... but the lack of sleep takes its toll.
A friend of mine admits that she and her husband mutually threaten each other with divorce every night around 4 a.m., when they get the nightly wake-up call.
Then they shrug it off the next day. They have to. We have to.

In the meantime, here I am at midday, still in my pyjamas. Thank goodness I foresaw it wasn't quite time to return to work yet.
Maybe I would have found the super-human strength to struggle into the office... but I doubt I would have remembered to get dressed.