Sleep Deprivation, Anyone?
I am a great fan of sleep. I “do” sleep like no one else. John often remarks, “Waking you up is a full contact sport.” Having researched the general rule of thumb that puppies can hold their bladder an hour for every month in age, we were working on a 2 hour cycle for puppy potty-breaks.
That being said, the first night at home went something like this:
A few minutes before the timer went off, I heard Lou Lou whimper and paw at her crate door. I jumped out of bed, grabbed my puffy coat from the floor beside the bed (I had planned ahead, of course), scooped her out of her crate and headed out the door to the elevator. I paused just long enough to stuff my feet into my slippers.
Once downstairs, we headed out to the gangway and then it hit me like only a sub-freezing wind chill can. We, genius team that we are, had brought home a puppy. In winter. In Chicago. You know, the Windy City where a mayoral election was won on a snow-removal platform.
By the time Lou Lou peed, my ankles were frozen, my ears were numb and I could barely feel my fingers. I hadn’t planned well enough, clearly. Once upstairs, I secured her in her crate and proceeded to set out what became my Puppy Mama Uniform. Long puffy coat, Uggs, ski cap, gloves and scarf all arranged on the chair nearest the front door so I could be weather-ready in seconds.
Convinced that potty-training a puppy during a Chicago winter would be a cake-walk, I set the timer for two hours and crawled back into bed.
The timer went off at 2 am, and I shuffled into my Puppy Mama Uniform and was able to get Lou Lou downstairs and outside before I started to sweat inside my winter armor. Lou Lou took her sweet time finding the perfect place to pee and by the time we got back upstairs I was wide awake. Dog back in crate, peel off layers, set timer, crawl in bed and stare at ceiling. Lather, rinse and repeat until the 6 AM reprieve when John took her out, then we were back up at 8 for breakfast.
This pattern of me getting no more than two hours of sleep at a time lasted for 2 weeks, in which I discovered many things about sleep deprivation. It makes you stupid to the point where you’re in the grocery store and you have a list, but find yourself unable to remember where any of your list items are located, so you go home without anything you needed. You go into a room for something and you forget why. You can’t remember if you brushed your teeth or put on deodorant. You can’t hold the thread of a conversation. As if the mental impairment wasn’t enough, you start to resemble that bad mug-shot of Nick Nolte that everyone thought was Gary Busey, but was actually a Polaroid shot.
The nice person in me would now like to formally apologize to all my friends who are human-baby moms. I used to think that childbirth had somehow lowered your IQ. I now know your brains didn’t come out with the placenta, you were just fucking exhausted.