Pither.com

This week really hasn't gone to plan, in any way for any one.

Monday started out innocently enough. I had some out of hours work to get done during the evening, but it wasn't anything major.

When I went to bed at 4am on Tuesday morning, I was of a different opinion. Monday was a disaster! The work was at least all done and finally working but had taken far, far longer than expected (I personally blame the syncrepl system in OpenLDAP 2.3.27).

Tuesday started at the normal early time and progressed in a generally normal and pleasant way. I even managed to get today's out of hours work done early in the evening, leaving time for a little dancing.

However it was again all a terrible trick! This time it was Edward's turn to break. This was his worst night ever (so far) for sleeplessness. After an initial series of 30-60 minute naps up until around 1am, he just wouldn't go to sleep at all. In fact he spent most of the night not only awake but screaming about it.

On any night this would be rather unpleasant for us all. But on this night I had just packed a bag ready for a two day business trip to Guernsey. For which I had to leave at 6am to drive to Southampton for a flight.

I eventually took myself downstairs, removed the gate from the lounge doorway, closed the door, curled up on the sofa (it's not long enough to do anything else) and tried my best to ignore the screams from upstairs.

Edward eventually settled for another short nap about an hour before I had to get up and I managed to doze off fairly soon after the screams stopped. Then my alarm went.

The trip to Guernsey was pleasant enough, I quite like flying on such a small plane (9 passenger seats). The work was busy, with a slightly late finish on the Wednesday but at least there was a nice hotel afterwards.

Liz and Edward had a significantly worse day of it though. After a morning of Edward mainly screaming and not seeming to want to do anything else, Liz took him to the doctors. He was diagnosed with an ear and throat infection and prescribed antibiotics (which came with the added excitement that he might be allergic as Liz is). Liz was warned not to expect any sleep that night!

As expected neither of them got much sleep.

Thursday I worked while Edward developed a rash and returned to the doctors. They couldn't identify or find a cause for the rash though so just told Liz to keep an eye on it.

I left Guernsey on time and caught my flight back (descending from 6,000 feet to 1,000 feet completely surrounded by thick clouds is really quite strange).

Sadly there was still a strange PHP/OpenLDAP problem outstanding that was causing PHP to segfault on exit if a referral rebind callback had been setup. But hopefully it's just a PHP/OpenLDAP version mismatch that can be easily fixed (I shall post again when I know the answer).

Anyway, I got home to a very tired family. Edward did seem to be quite significantly on the mend though. He was actually smiling occasionally and starting to try and crawl and play around again.

He even managed to go to sleep (admittedly very late at around 11pm) and slept most of the night with only a couple of fairly short disturbances.

With Edward's rash spreading from his bottom and legs up his back and stomach we returned to the doctors on Friday afternoon. He got another check and it was confirmed that his ear/throat infection was getting better, although the cause of the rash was still unknown. The doctor didn't seem too concerned though and said that if it's still there Wednesday next week to bring him back again.

Saturday and Sunday have been gradually returning to normal and while we haven't managed a good night of sleep, they have certainly been better than earlier in the week.

We sadly had to miss a party on Saturday night, but it really wouldn't have been fair on anybody to leave Edward with babysitters. While he was clearly getting better, he was still very tired, rather grumpy and had to be manhandled to practically force feed him his antibiotics!

While still tired, today he has certainly been showing us that he's feeling better. He has been playing, walking and most notably climbing (pulling himself half way up the side of his play pen).

As for my biphasic sleeping plan, let's just start again from tomorrow.

For a first try I don't think it's gone too badly. I have found that trying to nap in the early afternoon is practically impossible with such a small house and so many (2) other people in it.

However moving the nap to lunch time did largely resolve that.

It didn't help to resolve my other main "problem" - the girlfriend factor! Apparently it's unreasonable to stay up until 1am each day when your partner is still going to bed at a more normal time (although often only an hour or two earlier here).

My plan had always been to start out staying up late, as I find it much easier to be up late than I do getting up early. Then once I was in the swing of things, to move it around so that I had a more normal bed time but got up much earlier. Hopefully this would be less disruptive to a relationship.

It does have some downsides though, namely:-

• I'm not a morning person
• I work best in the evening/night

Anyway, bowing to the pressure after only three days, I switched to an earlier bed time along with an earlier start. To my slight surprise it actually wasn't all that hard to stick to.

Then the weekend arrived! Without the structure of a working day yet with the extra parental duties, chores and general time guzzlers that tend to occur during the two "restful" days of the week, I completely failed to find any nap time!

A fairly late evening meal out on Saturday led to the complete break down of the system. Both Saturday and Sunday were a write off.

So next week I start again. Hopefully with early to bed, early to rise plus lunch time naps. We'll see what happens.

For a long time I have been intrigued by the idea of getting more out of each day. More waking (and productive) time.

I have looked at polyphasic sleep especially the most famous form, Uberman's sleep, on several occasions in the past. However it has never really been practical for me to try it out.

Sadly this is still the case, but the slightly less ambitions biphasic sleep sounds like it might be possible.

The basic plan is to get a 1.5 hour nap at some point during the day (most details I can find suggest early evening) and then a 4.5 or 6 hour main sleep at some point during the night.

For some years now it has been quite common for me to only get 6 hours sleep or less on several nights a week. However I would always catch up by sleeping half of the weekend.

As a relatively new parent, the extra weekend sleep is no longer possible and my regular nightly sleep is still only a maximum of 6 (or on a really good night 7) hours. Plus with this now being our 10th month of parenthood, sleep deprivation is kicking in to help make a good portion of that sleep restless and less effective.

So if I can take my existing sleep time (6 hours) and transform it from "always over tired bad sleep" into "good sleep" simply by splitting it into a 1.5 hour nap and a 4.5 hour night, it sounds ideal. Further more as I'm already sleep deprived, it shouldn't even be too hard to get into.

So I have a plan, now to see if it works!

Today was my first attempt at taking an afternoon nap. I picked a time in late afternoon/early evening (which seems to be most popular) that I hoped would cause the least disruption to both my work and Liz/Edward.

This is what I've learnt:-

• it's difficult getting to sleep with a baby shouting in the background, even if someone else if looking after them
• in a house this small, even this fairly non-disruptive time is actually quite disruptive
• to use an alarm clock that actually goes off
• that laying down for 1.5 hours is not the same as getting 1.5 hours of sleep

I'm hoping to change a number of these points (especially the last) by adapting my plan slightly. Tomorrow I will try out taking my 1.5 hour sleep during an extended lunch break. While I can't guard against screaming babies, hopefully this will be a less likely time of day for disruptions. It's just a bit different to most other accounts I've found of biphasic sleeping.

So with about 30 minutes of nap sleep this afternoon, it's now ~1am and time for me to get to bed. For tonight the plan is a 6 hour sleep. I will reduce to 4.5 hours once the 1.5 hour sleeps are in place and working.