Well, this phrase is most heard when people around me hear about me promoting to a dad or dad-to-be: “Oh… Be prepared for countless sleepless nights.”, “Look forward to your sleepless nights!” etc.

True enough, with our new additional family member Darius, it’s inevitable that ‘sleepless nights’ are becoming part of our lives. Perhaps ‘sleepless nights’ is too strong a phrase; ‘interrupted sleep’ would be more appropriate.

After returning from the hospital last Thursday, the first few nights were indeed hard to survive through as we were still not used to waking up now and then in the middle of the night to attend to Darius’ cries.

However, after the weekend, with the help of distribution of tasks and much help from Cat, I am starting to be able to catch enough sleep to prepare for my next day at work.

Right now, for weekdays, our schedule is more or less as such:

Around 12 midnight: Darius wakes up and feeling hungry. I will feed him and he falls asleep after that. Change to his sleepsuit and new diaper. I will soak his soiled clothes into the bucket of detergent. After that we go to sleep too.

At around 3 plus, Darius wakes up. Cat feeds him and he falls asleep after that.

After 2 hours, he wakes up again at 5 plus, Cat feeds him and he falls asleep again.

Sometimes, he wakes up between 6 to 7 am. I will wake up and feed him then. After that I will go sterilise the equipment and wash the clothes to hang.

So in that sense, I will only need to do the feeding etc for Darius before I go to sleep, and do it once more before I go off to work on some days. Of course Darius’ ‘bio clock’ is not so stabilised yet so the schedule is subject to changes now and then. Hopefully he will begin to stick to a more routine schedule so it will be easier on us.

On the bright side, he slept pretty soundly between midnight to 4.30am last night, an improvement from his usual 3-hour sleep in the night time.

However, his appetite has dropped slightly over the past few days, dropping from his original 100ml of milk to 80ml now. Still, he is looking more chubby everyday (Cat loves chubby babies).

Also, he appears more cranky between 5pm to 9pm; probably he knows I’m returning from work and needs more attention? Though we were quite resistant to him using a pacifier, we relented to our tiredness and his cries in the end. Hopefully we will be able to get off his addiction before it turns bad.

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