So as most of you are well aware babies don’t generally sleep through the night after they breath the free air for the first time.  Now I know some of you have been blessed with children who start clicking off anywhere from 8-12 hours of sleep almost immediately.   One thing I have learned, and I’m guilty as well, is when little Johnny defies the odds, and all the rules laid out in all the baby books, by doing something like sleep through the night at 2 or 3 weeks old, everyone in that parents immediate circle will know about it.  Now thanks to social media like Twitter and Face Book even people outside the parents hemisphere will know that little Gertrud slept 10 hours last night.  Nothing wrong with that, you should trumpet it.  It’s like a small victory in the war against the sleep deprivers, or as some people call them, children.

Sacked out in the big bed. Wonder where daddy is sleeping?

Well, according to the baby books Frank was in the normal range when it came to sleep in the first 12 weeks he was free of the womb.  Which is another way of saying he was waking up a couple times a night.  I think it was literally the start of week 13 when he finally slept through the night.  We had gone to Grammy’s house in August.  We deployed with the normal equipment, including the pack-n-play.  I think it was our first deployment to Lexington since Frank was born.  We weren’t sure where to put his pack-n-play so he ended up in the bedroom with us.

Turned out to be a bad move.  I was pretty stuffed up and knocking the paint off the walls with my snoring.  I ended up sleeping on the couch in the living room.  Tracy can sleep through anything but Frank had never been in the room with us from the day he came home so I was not sure what his noise tolerance was yet.  Frank decided that would be the night to sleep 12 hours straight.  I woke up  around 8:30am feeling a little guilty about making Tracy get up with Frank during the night while I had slept the night away.  At least that’s what I thought had happened because no one woke me up in the wee hours.

After dragging myself off the couch I go into the bedroom to check on Tracy and Frank.  Frank is asleep and Tracy is passed out.  I figure she must have been up with him a few times during the night since that was the norm.  Tracy starts to wake up and almost at the same time we ask each other, “what time did you get up with him?”  Yeah that can’t be good.  I quick like, but quiet like, hop over to the pack-n-play and Frank’s just lying there.  I’m thinking he must be dead.  What other possible explanation could there be.  Great, we’ve had him three months and we fell asleep on the job and he bit the dust.

Then I saw his little tummy move.  Whew, that was close.  Prison orange just ain’t my color.  We both have a small fit of nervous but joyful giggles that Frank is in fact still alive and must have slept through the night.  Now some of you all have to back me up here.  After 3 months of not sleeping for even 6 hours in a row, when you get 8 or 10 as we did that night, you have no way of comprehending how it happened.  We had just resigned ourselves to the fact that we would not get 6 hours of sleep in a row ever again.  So we were a bit befuddled the first time it happened.

Scared the crap out of me bro!

Thinking about it now, I can’t imagine how I would have reacted had he slept through the night at 2 or 3 weeks old as some of our friends have reported with their kids.  I probably would have started thinking of ways to hide the body.  As it turns out, he did it again the next night and the night after that.  In fact after 2 and 1/2 years he’s still clicking off 12 hours a night and getting in a 3 hour nap in the afternoon.  Ooh.. I should post that to Face Book.

Clocking a few hours with pop.