To be fair, babies do sleep a lot. But they also wake up a lot. So we’ve gotta be constantly ready for whatever their vibe is.

if you’ve done something reprehensible you might be asked how you sleep at night. maybe sleeping like a baby is due to the association with innocence rather than literally how a baby sleeps (this is probably nonsense)

Thank you for calling out a pet peeve of mine.

“I slept like a 13-year-old on a Saturday morning”

I head a comedian once say they’d rather sleep like a drunken frat boy

“I slept like a baby” basically translates to “I pissed and shit myself and woke up screaming”.

I think it’s both directions. I baby sat a lot of babies before having my own and I learned two things from it. Firstly, a comfortable baby will not wake up for anything. Second is just just how much of the world we learn to tune out by adulthood.

That second one is important, babies dont have any understanding to base things on and everything is new. Which means that there a million possible ways to exhale that the baby has never heard you do before and it doesn’t have an association for exhaling to connect those yet so that’s one million strange noises that could be a threat just from you breathing. You may recognize ever creak in your floor, but do you realize ever distinct variant of creak that each creaky board makes? Because a baby can tell the difference and doesn’t know what a floor or a board, or friction between wood and nail, or resonance, or even what sound is. All it know is it’s never heard that before and it might be danger, better call for help.

For those dealing with babies like this, I have advice. Be noisy around your baby. Put a rocking chair on the creaky board, clear your throat while you hold them, burping and farting are a big one, we try to hide those socially and that’s why we get those videos where dad burps and the baby looks terrified, all of a sudden safety person just made scary new noise, what the fuck do I do? You’d look at your parent the same way if they just casually opened their mouth and made perfect whale noises. Take them around the house and show them benal things. I used to walk my boy through the kitchen and open and close cupboards and drawers. Lastly, respong with nonchalance. If they get spooked by a noise and you run in worried that the baby is crying, they feel fear about noise, see fear in you and that tells them they were right to be scared and noises mean danger. If instead you’re cool and collected, they see you’re not scared so they don’t need to be scared.

I think it meant the period just after the birth where they are more inclined to sleep a lot.

The incredibility about that statement only comes from babies having dramatically different, incompatible sleep schedules compared to grownups. And not all babies are the same, of course. Once my kids were down though they slept through earthquakes and I suspect even a hypothetical 747 revving its engines next to the bed wouldn’t have woken them up. There is some truth to the saying.

And i quote a comedian: “What? You shit you pants? You wake up crying every half an hour?”

Edit: Ben Bailey

Had our newborn with us to a party. And since this was our first kid everyone wanted to hold him. We were passing him around like a joint. Usually he’d wake up easily. But that day nothing would wake him up. We probably could have chucked him over the table without any trouble.

The only appropriate response is “that sucks, sorry to hear that”

Have a friend. Her second child always slept through the night and was a very heavy sleeper. That’s it. One kid of every single one I’ve ever heard of. The rest…literal shit show.

Maybe it originally meant a long sleep