What you need to know about tiredness is: it gets better. And I don’t mean because your child will start sleeping through the night at three weeks old.
Six-day-old babies don’t pick up on routines. Two-week-old babies don’t form bad habits from being fed to sleep. Four-week-old babies shouldn’t be sleeping for eight hours straight every night. They need to eat. They’re tiny and they can’t go that long without food.
People who tell you their six week old is doing a twelve-hour sleep stint are bald-faced liars. Or they’re drugging their children. Or it happened once because they were so rat-faced delirious with exhaustion they fell into an unconscious slumber and didn’t hear their baby crying, so they believe their baby slept all night, and so they will tell everyone they meet, as evidence of their amazing parenting skills. It will drive them to the brink of insanity when it never happens again, but at least they’ve been able to make everyone else feel bad.
New mothers will fantasise about the elusive block of three-hours-straight sleep. They think about it like they think about Ryan Reynolds’s abs. The promise of a four-hour block is simply too much to even think about—too delicious, too life-changing. It’s best to keep those dreams realistic.
So no, you won’t suddenly start getting huge chunks of sleep just yet. What will happen is that you’ll get used to it. You’ll start to feel less dead. You’ll learn you can actually function on two and a half hours’ sleep a night. You can stand up. You can hold a conversation. You can even leave your home.
Turns out you won’t die from lack of sleep. You might get close, but you will survive.