The Gender-Sleep Paradigm

I begin this blog with a preface: As I told you Rob, I hereby assassinate your character in the blogosphere.

So I'm thinking about doing a little psychological study. I've noticed of late that new parenthood seems to trigger in men the need to complain about lack of sleep. I noticed it a while ago, truthfully before my own baby arrived, when my brother kept commenting about how tired he was while his wife never did. But then we had Maddie and the difference between men and women and the need to complain:lack of sleep. Actually I don't need to go into any theories or elaborate descriptions. I'll just provide you with the sleep totals for this weekend:

Friday night:
Rob asleep at 10:00 pm straight through until 5:00 am (7 hours), nap: 7:30 - 12:00 pm (4.5 hours): total sleep 11.5 hours
Alex asleep at 10:00 pm, awake 11:00 pm (1 hour); asleep 1 am, awake 5:00 am to repeatedly kick Rob until awake because crying baby does not wake him (4 hours), asleep by 5:30 am until 7:30 am (2 hours), naps=0 because went to work, grocery shopped and did all kitchen prep work for week, made dinner AND pumpkin bread: total sleep: 7 hours

Last night at 9:59 pm, Rob is being quiet and grouchy. So I say, "What's wrong? Are you mad about something?" And he says, "I'm just tired."

Saturday night:
Rob asleep 10:00 pm to 7:30 am (9.5 hours)
Alex asleep 10:00 pm - 6:00 am (8 hours) Allowed to take nap at 7:30 am, woken up 8:10 am because "I need to take a shower." Truthfully, I wasn't that tired after 8 hours, but I had been thinking about how nice it would be to just crawl back under the covers and certainly I had fallen sound asleep shortly after my head hit the pillow.

To Rob's credit after his shower, he did offer to let me go back to bed. But really the damage was already done. And also to his credit he did thank me for letting him sleep in this morning.

Let's just hope Rob does his math and doesn't complain about being tired any more. And to be clear, men who read this. Complain includes not just words but also mopey, moody, quiet behavior. Sorry, you're just going to have to suck it up like us Moms do, and grow a pair.