Direct Correlation

There is a relationship between the amount of sleep I get and how much I love my baby.

I said it and it's true. No sleep = 0% love and a perfect night's sleep = 100% love.


I used to think it was a direct correlation...

Easy.

On 8 hours of sleep, tantrums are adorable. Ohhh, she's so strong-willed and smart!

On 5 hours of sleep, most things are slightly annoying.

On 3 hours of sleep, even the cutest things make me want to flip tables over.

But then I realized that the sleep to love relationship was not a direct correlation. There are tipping points.

0 - 5 hours have a slow rate of reward. 1 hour isn't really that different than 4. It's all NOT ENOUGH for me to even be pretend happy.

Things dramatically improve around 6, and I'm pretty happy after logging around 7 hours.

My sweet spot is 8.5 hours. Ahhh, perfect. Bonus points if I wake up of my own free will and not to crying baby alarm clock.


The problem is, there is another variable.

See that? That's an inverse relationship. As the baby grows up, I am much less tolerant to lost sleep.

When she was a newborn, I was singing to wildlife on 3 hours of sleep.

Now that she is 15 months old, she'd better have a really good reason to keep me up for 2 hours in the middle of the night. Like a swarm of bees is in her crib.

I haven't quite worked out the actual relationship between age of the child in months and acceptable hours of sleep lost, but I'm pretty sure it goes something like this...

Now THAT is scientific fact!