The magic of earplugs

Prior to my daughter being born, I was what most people would consider a heavy sleeper. But all that changed on my first night of being a mother. Every sound that came through the baby monitor jolted me awake in a fit of panic. What was that sound? Is something wrong? Is she breathing? Should I go check? Ironically the thing that woke me up the most was actually the sound of her breathing, go figure. I slept horribly for months, with every little breath, sigh, roll, rustle, and snore making me jump. And all this with the monitor set at the lowest possible setting! Eventually I gave up and turned the monitor off. We shared a common wall with Nicki's room and our house back then was small enough that if we left both doors open a crack I could hear if anything important was going on.

But the damage had been done by then. I had become (eek!) a light sleeper. From that point on, any and every sound you could imagine would wake me up, from the floors creaking to the wind blowing. It was terrible. Eventually we moved into this house and Gabe was born shortly after. The down side of a much larger house was that I now had to go back to my old baby monitor ways. And now we didn't only have 1 monitor on, we had 2! As you can imagine, between the 2 kids there was enough rustling around to keep me up half the night. And if it wasn't them, then it was a car driving by or a bird chirping. The cacophony of sounds just never seemed to end.

I was hesitant to turn off the monitors because I didn't trust myself to be able to hear if one of the kids needed me in the middle of the night without them on. And yet I kept telling myself that this was ridiculous and that there had to be some sort of way to block out all of the background noise and still let the important stuff through. Then one miraculous day last year my brother-in-law John told me that he sleeps with earplugs. I wondered if that could work for me! I was skeptical because unlike him, I wasn't trying to block out all sound. I needed some sort of futuristic earplugs that you could pre-program with what sounds are acceptable to let through and which ones aren't. Now there's a million dollar idea!

But anyway, I went to the store and bought the plain old regular kind. That night I popped them in and cranked the monitors up super loud because I was so paranoid that I wouldn't be able to hear anything. Amazingly, they worked like a charm! Even with the monitors at a low setting I could still hear if one of them was calling out for me. But gone was all of the breathing, sighing and rolling around that had kept me up in the past. Also gone were the sounds of birds chirping at 5 am, snow plows clearing the street and the heater clicking on and off. To make a long story short, I was in heaven. My sleep improved so dramatically that I felt like a new person. Now I sleep with earplugs in every night and couldn't be happier about it!