Sleep when the baby sleeps?

As I’ve mentioned before, my advice to new moms is always, don’t feel the need to take everyone’s advice. With that said, the piece of advice I hear most often is sleep when the baby sleeps. I totally get why people say it but it was not at all helpful to me.

To be fair, I bet I did sleep more when I only had one kid but even then and especially now with five kids, that is something I rarely did/do. Perhaps if all of my kids had been terrible sleepers my opinion on this would change. My kids weren’t sleeping through the night as soon as we got home from the hospital, but I was fortunate to have kids that usually didn’t confuse morning and night and therefore they would wake up to eat and then go to sleep shortly after.

But even on those days where I was up 3-4 times in one night, I would always want to get something done. “Something” does NOT mean “ALL the things” but I would find the one thing I wanted to get done and when the baby slept, I tried my best to do it. That ranged from cleaning up my bedroom, getting a load of laundry in, showering or even finishing the last episode of Project Runway I started 2 weeks ago. And sometimes, it did actually mean sleep! When I was able to accomplish one thing, the rest of my day felt so much better – especially when my one thing was laundry and the baby blew out of their diaper so I actually had clean clothes to put on them.

The thing I’ve learned: Do whatever you gotta do when the baby sleeps.

So while I can totally get behind the idea of sleeping whenever you can to make yourself feel more human, don’t feel like you NOT sleeping is somehow wrong.