When you are pregnant, people tell you how your life will change when your baby arrives. They tell you about sleepless nights, the blow-your-mind-love that you will feel and how you may never go to the movies again. No one ever told me that I would never again sleep like I did before I had children. Wait, if you are pregnant now, you may just want to stop reading, back away and skip this entry...it may be more than you are wanting to know.

The first sleep changes are obvious. You can't sleep as late or your baby wakes you up every couple of hours for a while. The other changes are more subtle. It's the little voice in your sleeping head that seems to be on alert. It sounds something like this: "any minute now, someone is going to wake up with a fever" (or a nightmare, or a stomach bug, or because of the lightning, or because they peed in the bed, and so on). So when you hear noises in the house you immediately perk up. Then there's the crazy Mommy brain stuff, which sounds more like this: "In the event of a fire, which 2nd story (painted shut) window will I have to break and crawl out of while holding 2 hysterical children and the 2 dogs?" or "what if something terrible happens and I sleep right through it?". Does it matter to my sleeping self that this mode of thinking is a little crazy? No, just like it didn't matter to my half sleeping self that my husband is asleep beside me and could (at the very least) carry a dog and a child in the first crazy fire scenario. I have a feeling that I am not alone in this though, am I right so far?

Even more subtle still is the part of parenthood that goes so deep that it isn't as obvious. For me personally it is a sense of responsibility that I never had before. My days are rarely empty and there is almost always something to do and someone to take care of. This has forever changed everything about the way my life is lived, sleep included. While I would love to nap more and sleep deeper, I wouldn't trade any of it.

So, Mommies, if you are up late reading this...go to bed. It's late and you will likely be woken up in an hour anyway. Go to bed knowing that you are not alone, we're all in this sleep LESS and love FULL state together.