I wrote once about a recurring theme that emerged from talking to parents of young children before we had the little guy.  If you asked them what it was like, they would almost always say they were tired.  And some fathers got this faraway look in their eyes as if they were remembering a distant memory – the time when they used to be able to sleep.

This last week I would have been one of those fathers.  It was absolutely brutal last week dealing with a toddler with jetlag, and myself with jetlag, all by myself (my wife out of the country on meetings).  Traveling back and forth, doing all these things.  In addition it was stressful stuff – selling and looking at apartments, phone calls with my boss and colleagues, and so on.

Then, we got on the plane and I thought, “ok, I will get some sleep when the little guy is sleeping.”  Nope.  I had too many things on my mind, too many things to worry about, apparently.  So instead of sleeping for that 5 hours I sat there trying to sleep, or gave up and watched a few movies.

When we finally got home I took a short morning nap (by myself, my wife took the little guy out on a short walk for him to sleep).  I am not a napping person.  I hate napping, actually, because I get so “out of it” when I take naps.  And today was no exception.  It took me almost 30 minutes to pull my head out of the clouds after that 2 hours of sleep.  2 hours I desperately needed.  I would have preferred just 45 minutes, but I think my body was so thirsty for the sleep I needed that I would have been sleeping longer regardless of any attempts to shorten the nap.

Sleep is so important that it’s crazy to me that the very existence of the species creates little humans who deprive their parents of sleep – which is so essential for making good decisions and being able to live life fully.  You’d think instead we would have created offspring who let us sleep and don’t argue or have a flip out at the snap of a finger.  But I guess things can’t be too easy or we wouldn’t appreciate it, right? 😉