It turns out that the first casualty after bringing a baby home isn't the grossed-out feeling of regularly handling human waste, or the casual assumption that your time is your own. Both of those things do go, of course, but the very first thing, and the one which you keep noticing after it's gone, is your sleep schedule.

It's not that we didn't know that newborns want feeding every two to three hours, 24 hours a day. We planned for that, set up a sidecar sleeper, assumed that in the general case, Christina could just pull her over without fully waking up herself, and I could sleep through the entire thing. What we didn't plan for or anticipate is that the child of two people who are happiest staying up late and sleeping in, would be most active during the night.

It would be funny if it were happening to someone else: during the day, we have people over, and Olive is cute, and peaceful, and asleep. She eventually wakes, gently fusses to indicate that she's hungry, and then falls asleep again. No stress, no trouble: to our visitors, she seems like a perfect baby. They go home after a while, wondering why the two of us seem so tired.

Later in the evening, we'll all go to bed, and that's when the trouble starts. You see, at around 1 AM, Olive gets active: she's alert, and engaged, and ready to play! No way is she going to fall asleep just because the lights are off and nothing is happening; she'll just cry until one of us starts to interact with her. As we invariably do, this solves the problem, from her perspective.

For three or four hours of core sleep time, she needs to be cuddled, entertained, interacted with. She wants to eat more often than during the day; she will play any sort of game, as long as she's not left alone or ignored. Then, sometime around 5 AM, she's done: after one final feeding, she's ready to settle in for the night. That's for newborn values of settling in: she still needs feeding in two to three hours, it's just that she's content to sleep in between.

The result is that I've spent the last week waking up sometime around noon to a newborn fussing at my side. I get up, take her downstairs, and wake up Christina, who has been dozing on the couch, for the first proper feeding of the day. We spend the next hour or so trading Olive back and forth as we go through our morning routines and make ourselves presentable, and then try to get some chores done in the afternoon. There are far fewer usable hours in the day than there are normally, and they're generally spent in a groggy haze.

One thing that characterizes us as parents is that we pre-buy books on child development and potential issues, and read them well in advance. Happily, the colic book looks like it can stay on the shelves. Unhappily, the same can't be said for the ones about making the kid actually sleep at night. What's truly aggravating is that the sleep books pretty much just say "until the kid is four months old, there's no point in even trying to establish some kind of regular sleep schedule. You'll find that afterwards, you won't really remember the fatigue; you'll actually find yourself missing these mid-night hours together! Just bear with it and things will be fine."

This puts me in mind of the driver's ed books, back when I was learning: "Until you've driven for half a year or so, you're just going to crash. It's inevitable, so don't bother fighting it. Instead, savor all the attention you'll get from the EMTs, and focus on the great relationships you're building with your mechanics."

Maybe you went to a different driver's ed course than I did.

Don't get me wrong, there are some great things happening these days: Olive is visibly larger than she was at first, and much more active: we've put her down, swaddled, on her back, and woken to her cries a few hours later to discover her with her arms free, lying on her side; clearly there is at least some capacity to move developing, if only in extremis. A few days ago she started to look at things, instead of always gazing past them with the thousand-yard stare. Only two weeks in, these are all real and impressive changes.

I just wish that I were properly awake to appreciate them.