Sleep, revisited

On other fronts, after eight months or so of really excellent sleeping habits, Sofie's started to go through what various internet folks refer to as the "hellaciously bad sleep regression" that happens around 18-19 months. She's napping fine, but bedtime has become hell.

Now our kid who formerly had the easiest and shortest bedtime routine EVER just cannot get to sleep; she screams and seems really frantic and scared when we put her in her crib and needs to be held and coddled for a lot longer before she'll finally lay down. This process can take up to two hours, depending on how upset she is. And believe me, nothing is more exhausting at the end of a long day than struggling for two hours to get your screaming, frightened toddler to bed.

We're trying to slowly ease back into sleep training, but she's just SO frantically upset that we can't quite bring ourselves to do it yet. So we hold her, or pat her back, or sit in the chair, or at a minimum just shush her from the doorway, and she tries repeatedly to go to sleep, with fits of crying in between. The good news is that it's taking a little bit less time every night. Tonight was only an hour. This may sound like a lot but not compared to yesterday night.

Once she's down, it's anyone's guess what will happen after that -- some nights she still sleeps through, and some nights she wakes up shrieking with terror two or three times and needs our help. Gloworm, it appears, is no longer up to the task of fighting off her nighttime fears by himself.

Way to fall down on the job, glow-bug. Thanks a bunch!

We're not used to this wake up schedule anymore. It sucks rocks. I drank an entire pot of coffee this morning, by myself. We're groggy and tense, and bedtime is a subject of not small amounts of dread. I'm trying to up her physical activity, make sure she gets a lot of fresh air, and otherwise wear her out during the afternoon, but I'm not sure it's helping yet.

Tonight I left just as the whole routine was starting to go to my Yoga Momma class, and I felt guilty about how intensely relieved (and almost elated) I was to not have to do bedtime tonight. It was truly refreshing to miss the whole thing just for one night.

On the plus side, I take comfort in two things:

• Every kid her age that we know is going through some version of this right now -- the ones that are sleeping ok aren't napping, and vice versa. Several are having the screaming/scared issues Sofie is, and the ones that aren't want to get up and play for two or three hours in the middle of the night. So it's got to be just a developmental phase. A quick google search backs that concept up.
  
• I'm sure it will pass. Moxie, parenting advice goddess, posits that this happens around 18-19 months and passes around 20 months and it really doesn't matter what you do. So whether we're hard core about sleep training or take a softer line and cuddle her when she's scared, it'll pass.
  
  And in the long run, Sofie likes her sleep. I trust that she'll be back to normal soon enough.

Another big sleep day

I was going to not post about this because all of the other things I thought were going to be sleep disrupters and posted about turned out to be nothing. But still, it seems worth noting that today, Sofie is sleeping in her own room for the first time. After installing new windows and lightproof blinds, we just an hour ago moved her crib down from our bedroom upstairs to her playroom/bedroom on the first floor, and she is at this very moment in there trying to take a nap. And not liking it so much.

So we're back to doing the "every ten minutes, go in and comfort her until she settles down" thing. And we're anticipating that for a few nights we're going to have to leap up if she wakes in the middle of the night and is scared; probably she'll need a few days of reassurance before she can return to her usual habit of just turning over and pressing her gloworm for music, and drifting right back off to sleep.

It's good that we're starting this on a weekend.

I've got really mixed feelings about this whole process, even though it needed to happen. It'd be one thing if her bedroom was on the same floor as us -- I don't think I'd feel weird about that. But down a floor seems like a long ways, even though it's still just steps from our bed, right at the bottom of the staircase. And it's been nice having her upstairs with us all the time! We've spent many a happy moment watching her play in her crib before she knew we were awake, from our vantage point across the room. I find it immensely comforting to be able to hear her breathing if I wake up, and sometimes to tiptoe over and take a peek at her. It's comforting knowing she's literally RIGHT there, an arm's reach away.

On the other hand, she's almost 18 months old, and she's old enough to sleep in her own room. We have monitors next to the bed and will still hear every sound she makes, and I can still roll over and hear her breathing. And wow -- it's already nice to be able to go upstairs during naptime without worrying about waking her up. It'll be great to be able to turn on a light upstairs after seven p.m. for the first time in over a year. It'll be a relief to be able to have a conversation without whispering when we go to bed, and to be able to sneeze and flush the toilets without constantly fearing waking the baby.

I can see all of this. I agree. She may even sleep a whole lot better. A lot of people have said this is often the case when they're no longer in their parents' room.

But I think I'm going to miss her tonight.

More on sleep

I read a really interesting NY Magazine article on sleep while we were here – mostly focused on older kids but I think it’s fascinating. It talks about the effect of as little as a half hour deprivation in sleep on elementary-school kids. A few quotes pulled out from different parts of the article:

The performance gap caused by an hour’s difference in sleep was bigger than the normal gap between a fourth-grader and a sixth-grader. Which is another way of saying that a slightly sleepy sixth-grader will perform in class like a mere fourth-grader. “A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development,” Sadeh explains.

***

Sadeh’s findings are consistent with other researchers’ work, all of which points to the large academic consequences of small sleep differences. Dr. Monique LeBourgeois of Brown University studies how sleep affects pre-kindergartners. Virtually all young children are allowed to stay up late on Fridays and Saturdays. Yet she’s discovered that the sleep-shift factor alone is correlated with performance on a standardized school-readiness test. Every hour of weekend shift costs students seven points on the test.

Dr. Paul Suratt of the University of Virginia studied the impact of sleep problems
on vocabulary-test scores of elementary-school students. He also found a seven-point reduction in scores. Seven points, Suratt notes, is significant: “Sleep disorders can impair children’s I.Q.’s as much as lead exposure.”

It also went on to talk about how early schools start now, and how school districts that have moved their start times later have seen a dramatic rise in their test score results. This is something I'm really curious about; I see the kids on our block leaving for school at 6:30 a.m., and it seems so early. School for us started at 8:30 and got out at 3:30. Why so early now? Would kids learn better if it just started an hour later?

Anyways, if you're interested, you can read the whole article here. Very thought-provoking.



***

On the more personal front, last night we went out to a romantic dinner, alone, while Sofie threw her food around the dining room for a half hour in protest and then went to bed for Zoe like a little angel (no crying!) and proceeded to sleep all night for the third night in a row. I really do think she's got this. She stirs a couple times in the middle of the night, cries for a second or two half-heartedly, finds her glow-worm and presses his music button, and goes back to sleep. And she's now sleeping all the way until 6:30 or 7:00 too. Yay!

Note to self: must buy an extra glow-worm in case this one is ever lost.

What's interesting to me about this is the almost palpable sense of relief I feel like I'm seeing from her about all of this. The book, which I'm beginning to mentally refer to as "the book that saved our lives," talks about how babies can actually be really angry when they can't sleep - that they wake up in the night and really, really WANT to get back to sleep and get ticked off when you can't help them figure out how to do it in an effective way. That makes sense, looking back; there's been many times that she's seemed angry in the middle of the night.

We've read many, many sleep books and given this a half-hearted try on occasion before - so why now? Well, partly it's that we were just ready. I used to love snuggling her to sleep at night and resisted giving that up for a while. Partly it's that we finally did things in the right order - I tried to train her to go down for naps by herself a month or so ago, which failed miserably; this book says that bedtime is a much easier place to start than naps, so begin there. Correct again. And also - we've read a lot of really helpful sleep books, but this one was different somehow in that it seemed a lot simpler and more straightforward. Nothing much to figure out -- is your kid doing this? Then go to chapter eight. Is your kid doing this? Then go to chapter ten. And when I got to chapter ten? We were the case study. It described us to a tee.


Anyhow, peace and sleep continues, as does the utter relaxation which is Hawaii, and we're all doing great. More soon!

Sleep! Sweet, sweet sleep!

Sofie is napping. Right now. In her crib. By herself.

This may not sound like a big deal, but it's only the second time in the last month that she's taken a nap without me holding her or sitting next to her on the bed. And I'm so excited by it that I feel like having a little party! Yay! Mama gets a little break.

I've come to the realization that we need start a little bit of sleep training. I've been fervently against crying-it-out sleep routines since she was born -- I just couldn't face letting her cry alone in a crib. Plus I was (and still am), to be honest, head over heels intoxicated with this little creature and there were few things as sweet in the first months as watching her fall asleep in my arms.

This quickly became the routine for both naps and bedtime -- hold her until she falls asleep, then gently ease her over to her crib, deposit her, and creep away hoping she wouldn't wake up. Most of the time, lately, she does wake up, and the whole process starts over, or in the case of naps just gets abandoned as I resort to sitting with her on the bed so at least she'll get a little sleep.

Comforting for her, yes, but the end result is that our baby is not learning how to soothe herself to sleep. And I'm getting increasingly frazzled by nap routines that take huge chunks out of my day, making it hard for me to get anything done around the house, and bedtime routines that can last up to two hours.

So - time to change things. Today, for her afternoon nap, I gave her her bottle, cuddled her until she was sleepy, and then put her in her crib. Awake.

Miss Sofie did not like this at all. She protested. She thrashed. But I sat on the floor next to her, stuck my arm through the crib slats, and patted her until she fell asleep. And then I inched my way out of the room a little at a time, freezing each time she sensed movement and almost-but-not-quite woke up, and finally made my way to the reading chair at the other end of the upstairs.

She slept fitfully for the first ten or fifteen minutes - waking up to cry every few minutes - but the longest she cried before getting herself back to sleep was three and a half minutes, which meant I never reached my "I'll go back and pat her some more after five minutes of crying" limit.

And now? She's been fast asleep for over an hour.

And me? I've swept the floor. I've cleaned the playroom. I've put in some laundry. I ate a very small chocolate bar and had some diet coke. I've read a chapter in a book. And in my head, I'm spinning in a meadow like Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music. My baby is sleeping! Alone!

Hallelujah.

Naps first. If we can get this consistently in place as the nap routine, we'll start working on bedtime in a week or two. We're definitely not going to hard core Ferberize her, but I think we can put together pieces from a lot of different plans and methods and come up with something that's going to work a lot better for all of us.

Single parenting

Trying to spare Brett a bad case of end-of-summer-and-I-never-went-camping blues, I've given him a parenting furlough this weekend so that he can escape to eastern Washington for some man time. Scratching, belching, and reading conspiracy literature around a campfire are all on the agenda. Just to show that he hasn't lost his whimsy, though, he took Herschel with him.

Sofie and I are having our first weekend alone. I'm about 96% fine with being a lone parent for a weekend and 4% nervous, which is a fair enough equation. As long as she sleeps, we'll be just fine.

And the sleep, thankfully, has been improving a little of late. For several days she utterly refused to nap this week, but it's sorting itself out and she's been sleeping well at night throughout. Brett's developed some newfangled way to get her back to sleep in the middle of the night that involves just pushing her back down onto the mattress when she starts to sit up. Sounds awkward, but apparently she accepts the suggestion just fine and rolls over to go back to sleep. I'm going to have to try that tonight.

I'm also going to use these three days to try to back her bedtime up a little earlier. She used to stay up almost until nine; recently this has moved up a lot to about 7:45. Now I'd like to get that backed up to around 7:00 or 7:30, little by little. From some things I've read recently, one of the primary causes of bad napping during the day is a too late bedtime, which that book defined as anything later than 8:00. Yikes. So we're working on that.

Updates to come.

Sleep Mysteries

Oh cruel, cruel world. I think Sofie's growing out of her morning naps. Is that possible at this tender age? For months now she's gone down for a morning nap like a little lamb, almost exactly two hours to the minute after she's woken up. The last two weeks, though, it's gotten harder and harder to get her down, and it's been slipping later and later when she finally does sleep -- three hours after she wakes up, three and a half.

And then there's today, when I've finally left her playing in her crib for a while in hopes that she'll conk out at least a little bit before our new mother's helper (neighbor boy, Drew) comes over to play with her for an hour. Because honestly? He's only twelve. Sure, he's babysitter certified and CPR certified and has already done a little bit of babysitting; he's prepared. But I bet he'd rather not have the screaming, fussy, overtired baby from hell for his first visit to our house. I find that hard enough to cope with, and I've got several decades on him.

With the increased time between wakeup and nap in the mornings, we've started rearranging our schedule a bit. That used to be dead time - nothing happened until the morning nap was over, because by the time you feed the baby, have breakfast yourself, and read a few books she'd be back asleep. Now we get up, have breakfast, and go out for a run or a walk. It's the only time of day I can stand to exercise outside now that it's routinely topping 80 every afternoon, and it's a good way to start the morning. I'm enjoying the revved up feeling I get from exercising first thing each day. This could be good.

But still. Couldn't she just hold on to the two-naps-a-day routine a little bit longer?

Anyone reading who can comment on when the moving-to-one-nap switch happened for your kids?

And a postscript...

We had to find a new use for the bassinet, now that Sofie's outgrown it. Right now it's serving as animal ark:

The great crib drama that wasn't

Well - she did great. That was a nice surprise. The first night she slept two four hour stints with each of us getting up to help her get back to sleep once, and the second night she cried twice but put herself back to sleep in under a minute and we didn't get up at all. Yay Sofie!

This crib thing feels very freeing to me. She's not much further away than when she slept at the end of the bed, but she's far enough away that I don't feel like I have to tiptoe around when I get out of bed, and we feel a little less guilty about having the television on after she's sleeping. And naptimes - naptime is a revelation. Knowing she's safe and secure in a crib she can't climb out of (rather than on my bed, or in the bassinet) is WONDERFUL. I can safely go do things elsewhere in the house and keep an ear out for her wakeup cries without wondering if she's going to roll out of bed.

So big buildup, little payoff in the drama department. But that's a good thing.

On a side note, I found her standing up in her crib today, having pulled herself up on the railing. Sheesh, Sofie, you're only six months old! You don't have to learn to do EVERYTHING this month...

Pace yourself!

Big Night

Tonight is a big night at our house - it's the night we're going to put Sofie to sleep in her crib for the first time. To date, she's been sleeping in her lovely Eddie Bauer bassinet at the foot of our bed. That's been great, but she's too big for it now - she's able to sit up completely in it, which is a no-no (because it raises the possibility of her toppling over the edge), and is past the weight limit by a couple of pounds.

But Sofie is not so big on change, so this promises to be a momentous event in her young life. I've been preparing her by putting her down for her afternoon naps in the crib all week. She's doing fairly well with that - she cried for a long time the first day, but eventually settled down to sleep after a few visits and pats from me. For the rest of the week, she's only cried a few minutes each time - maybe ten minutes the second day, and hardly at all today (day five). After a little bit of fuss she turns over on her stomach (impossible in the bassinet), and goes to sleep, usually sideways, like this:



You can see her big huge tiger -- actually a former occupant of Brett's office at Microsoft that Sofie inherited when he quit -- who she loves more than life, pressed up against her legs.

We moved the crib upstairs a few weeks ago, and it's now in the front nook off our bedroom so that she's still not too far away - a few yards from the bed is all. The idea is that it'll be easier for us, at least, to move her into the crib if we don't have to run downstairs to her bedroom all of the time, and then once she's used to the crib we can move her to her bedroom when she's a few months older. Or maybe we're just setting ourselves up for further difficult transitions this way, who knows.

If I had it all to do over again, I'd have moved her into the crib much, much earlier, or not used the bassinet at all - just put the crib up here right from the beginning and had her sleep there. Then we wouldn't be going through this potential disruption. Ah, the things I know now...

Anyway, we're hoping that the napping this week will have prepared her a little, but realistically speaking we're probably going to be up in the middle of the night a lot this weekend. We're hoping that maybe by Monday she'll be getting used to it and the worst will be over.

I will, of course, let you know how it went.

The little wins

Tuesday was basically cancelled due to lack of sleep. Oh sure, we got up and went about the minimal motions of our day - Brett got up at the last second and went to work, after depositing the baby in my arms and reassuring me yes, you can do this despite only 1.5 hours of sleep. But we did nothing that didn't have to be done. Coffee with a friend this afternoon? Cancelled. Dinner plans? Cancelled. Brain cells? Cancelled.

But it's the little things on days like this that see me through. I feel proud to realize, at 7 p.m., that in spite of Sofie staying up literally ALL night last night (for the second time this week), I showed up for duty today and did a pretty good job. I emptied the dishwasher and did the laundry. I cooked dinner for Brett and was nice to him too. And most importantly, I was cheerful and patient with Sofie in spite of my tiredness and we had a nice day. We read books. We played games. We sang songs. We jumped. Not only was I not cranky with her, I never even felt like being cranky with her.

Some days, you can surprise yourself with parenting resources you didn't know you had.

And Brett? He surprises me too, sometimes, with the amount of patience he has on these nights when it becomes apparent that there's just no way she's going to sleep, and that it's beyond what one person can handle. I try, I really do, to just handle it, but when one hour becomes two becomes three in the middle of the night, there's nothing like a supportive partner who will get up and hold the baby, or take her down to the basement for a while so you can get an hour of sleep, despite the fact that he has to go to work in a few hours. We're in this thing together, such actions say, and I know staying home with her is hard work too and you need a little rest to do it -- and there's nothing more sexy than that.



On a side note, I seem to post about sleep so much that I've now created a category for it. Probably they're the least interesting things on here, since they're always the same. "Oh god, she stayed up all night again!" Oh well.

Poor baby

Oh my. This is how normal people feel, people who don't have the world's happiest, easiest baby, people whose babies don't sleep through the night and smile most of the time. My hat's off to anyone who has the moral fiber to live through colic without resorting to drink. I don't know how people withstand the hours of crying.

Sofie does not have colic, I realize. Colic is much, much worse. But she began a crying binge about two days ago when our friends Alan and Beth were visiting, and has pretty much yet to stop. She has a few happy hours a day, but the rest of the time she's in deep doo doo and letting me know it. And I'm amazed at the ability this has to reduce me to a quivering lump of jelly.

She's okay, not sick or ailing or anything serious. But she's teething and she has her first case of diaper rash and a lot of gas (what else can I possibly cut out of my diet while also keeping myself alive and semi-well nourished?) and she isn't sleeping well, back to getting up once or twice a night again after an all-too-brief return to sleeping through. And to be honest, in her opinion, her mom just isn't getting it and it makes her good and mad. Fix me, she screams! And I try. But she's not impressed.

Baby misery is something you can't quite understand until you experience it, until it's your own kid who needs something and you can't figure out what. She cries so hard that she gives herself hives, or big shuddering hiccups; she cries with a trembling fury that would level buildings if she only had a bigger power source. Good gravy, this kid can cry. The usual tricks (stripping her naked, making her fly, bouncing, rocking, you name it) don't work. And my heart just aches for her.

Brett came upstairs tonight after dinner to find me lying on the floor at the foot of the bed, on my back, staring up at the ceiling, just breathing in and breathing out. Sofie was asleep on the bed. Finally, blessedly, asleep after hours and hours of agony (hers) and effort (mine).

"What are you doing?" he said.

"I'm afraid that if I sit on the bed I'll wake her up," I replied.

"Ah. Good point."

"And it's peaceful down here."

"You mean no one is crying, right?"

"I think I'm a little afraid of her right now."

Yay!

Oh thank heaven - she slept through the night last night, after nine days of partying at four a.m. Hallelujah!

Sofie, you can have that pony you've been asking about.

Sleep strike #3 (Subtitle Argggggg)

It's been a rough few days with Sofie, who's going through her four month sleep regression with a vengeance. This has happened before, at least twice, most recently right after I went back to work. The last time it lasted about a week and then mysteriously cleared up, so we're keeping our fingers (and toes) crossed that this will be true here as well.

I suppose lack of sleep addles your brain so each incident seems like The Worst One Ever. But this one genuinely does. Last time, she just woke up and mewed for a bottle, and we would stand over her crib and give her one. She'd drink a little without even fully waking up, then drift back to sleep. Our sleep was interrupted but not ripped to shreds.

This time? Each night gets longer and harder than the last. First off, she wakes up fully and starts conversing with us from her bassinet -- babbling and babbling, louder and louder, until we get our sorry butts out of bed. Then she has a drink. Then she has a party. No crying, mind you, just a hearty celebration of the joys of being awake in the middle of the night. Time to wave your feet around in your hands and talk loudly and roll from side to side, punctuated occasionally by a brief break to nurse.

The first night, the party lasted an hour. The second night, it lasted ninety minutes. The night before last (Brett's turn to get up with her), it was two hours.

Last night (my turn), she got up twice. First from 2:30 to 3:30, and then just as I was finally drifting back to sleep around 4:30, she got up again and stayed up until 6:15.

Remember that commercial where the guy holds up an egg and says "This is your brain" and then drops it in a frying pan where it sizzles up and says, "This is your brain on crack?" The parents' version of that would be to hold up the egg ("This is your brain") and then drop it into a pan where absolutely nothing happens, a complete flatline: the pan, the egg, absolutely no activity whatsoever.

This is your brain on a sleep strike.

(Here's an interesting little article on the great parenting blog Ask Moxie about sleep regressions, if you're interested.)

Update

And just like that, I'm free. Friday came and went, and I'm now done with work for the moment, temporarily "retired."

I thought I'd feel somewhat sad leaving Microsoft on Friday afternoon, but honestly, I didn't. I felt fantastic. It felt like graduation from high school or college, like pulling out of my driveway in Connecticut in my little Corolla on the first mile of the cross country drive to Seattle, like leaving my apartment on Queen Anne to move into Brett's house after the wedding. I'm pretty good with change, I think. I generally look forward to it more than I dread it, however much I may go on about it on here...

I can't wait to wake up Monday and realize that I don't have to think about work anymore. My ID still works and my mailbox still exists, and I've been checking it here and there just to see if I got any more replies to my goodbye mail, but soon that will disappear too and I'll be completely cut off from the whole arena. And I think I'm going to feel a huge sense of peace.

In other news, Sofie is going through an interesting phase right now where her sleep habits are changing again - she's going to bed earlier most nights, around eight or nine, and also getting up around six instead of seven. I have no right to complain, since nine times out of ten she sleeps straight through the night, but boy do I not like getting up at 5:45 or 6:00 every day! However, she makes up for it by being adorable in the morning - for the last week or so, she wakes up and talks to herself in her bassinet for twenty minutes or so before she insists on being picked up. Brett and I find ourselves lying there giggling at her "conversations," in spite of our determination to eke out a few more minutes of sleep - it's so funny.

She's also discovered that her feet are covered in wiggly things called toes and that you can grasp said toes in your hands and wave your feet around with your hands. Oh, the fascination! She'd do nothing but this all day long if she could. My friend Jacki thinks she might be left-handed, since she seems to be favoring the left hand and foot in these exercises. Okay by me.

The only other recent development of note is that her hair is sticking straight up off her head, several vertical inches, in a big huge cockscomb across the crown of her head. There seems to be no way to mold it down. How does this happen? She has so many cowlicks that I can't find any way to successfully comb her hair into anything presentable - it goes in so many different directions that there's no way to smooth it out.

The solution, I fear, is going to have to be dreadlocks.

Update

Well so much for Sofie's great sleep skills. After nine straight days of sleeping through the night, last night she got up at two a.m. and stayed up until after six. We took turns trying to get her back to sleep, but nothing worked -- not singing, swaddling, rocking, vibrating in her bouncy chair, sitting quietly, watching television, swinging, putting her down in her bassinet, you name it, we tried it. Sleep is for suckers, she declared, and stuck to her guns.

Caffeine? Maybe. I had a coffee and a diet coke yesterday, one of them late enough in the day to keep me up for a while when I went to bed. I won't be doing that again.

Eight week picture


Today we walked around Green Lake, a local lake with a three mile walking track and various playgrounds, ballfields, and other recreational areas. While we were there I was amused to see a huge, shaven-headed, ear-pierced, scary-looking dude, wearing a World Wrestling Foundation sweatshirt, walking from his car to the playground while proudly carrying what must have been his daughter's Dora the Explorer red plastic purse. Because when you look like that, who's going to mess with you? Carry any kind of purse you want, dude.

Sofia slept through the walk, mostly, but I was happy to just get all the way around the lake. Last week I started working out in earnest again for the first time since the surgery, spending a few hours on the treadmill downstairs. It's been about five months since I've really worked out, after three years of keeping up a pretty consistent routine, and I must say that I'm shocked at how far I've slipped - a half hour on the treadmill was totally kicking my @#$%, and a three mile walk at a decent clip is much harder than it ought to be. It's going to be quite a while before I'm jogging again, I think.

That's a little depressing.

Sleeping like a baby???

Why do people use the phrase "sleeping like a baby" to indicate a really high quality sleep experience?

Having recently acquired an infant myself, I now know that "sleeping like a baby" more accurately involves:

• Sleeping for an hour here, an hour there, accompanied by random shrieks and grunts and groans that sometimes sound like a pack of wild dogs
  
• Falling asleep any variety of places but waking up shrieking when someone tries to move you into your comfy bed, where you become instantly awake
  
• Picking random days on which you are not going to sleep at all

All in all, I'd rather sleep like a middle aged person - able to fall asleep at the drop of the hat, especially in front of the television, and always happy for the opportunity to nap.