Can a baby sleep too much?

Early on in our parenting experience, we used to try to keep Jack awake during the day, thinking if he slept too much he'd be up all night. I have since learned from more experienced mommies that, seemingly paradoxically, the more babies sleep in the day, the better they sleep at night. Something about getting overtired and then fighting sleep. At any rate, Jack has been sleeping so much lately I've started to wonder if in fact there is such a thing as too much sleep. All of a sudden, he sleeps almost as much as he did as a newborn. Sleeps in until 8, sleeps again from about 9 to noon, and then again from 1 to 4... I hope he doesn't have baby mono! On the upside, this has allowed me to get a lot of work done. They say nothing motivates like a deadline and usually I am a very deadline-oriented person, unable to buckle down very effectively when nothing is looming with much immediacy. But I would say nothing motivates like the opportunism of a new parent and a temporarily sleeping infant that could wake up at any time. It's like a sprint to the finish without knowing where the finish line is, so you just keep sprinting until your time's up.

To that end, we have just hired some babysitting help and our first day was today. I led lab meeting on Tuesday, getting feedback for a side project that seemed like a good idea before Jack was born, and Jack sat very quietly through the first part and then got antsy for the last part, the part where I was supposed to be writing down their comments. And then I met with my advisor afterwards and her very exciting feedback was that she thinks I'm ready to start writing up the first part of my dissertation now, and that I should aim for getting it out for publication before my field season! So suddenly my "I don't really have anything to do until May" theory is out the window. Fortuitously, that same night, we had dinner with Danny's god-sister Betsy, who is the house mom for the Theta sorority, which is apparently filled with aspiring nurses and doctors with tons of nannying experience who are just dying to babysit for Jack. I like this set-up very much because they're right on campus so they can take him for just a few hours at a time so I can have a meeting or get some work done and still be able to feed him or be right there if there's anything else he needs. And there's no minimum or set number of hours like for most childcare options, and as long as I work around their class schedule they're available whenever.

The only problem this presents is that it now feels like I have to pay to work. I know that sounds backwards, since technically I am getting paid to work, but my money is tied to a fellowship that pays me (and has been paying me) regardless of what I get done. It has paid me for the past two months for essentially doing nothing. So that seems like the status quo, that money is just there every month, according to my frame of reference, and now suddenly there will be less of it, and how much less depends on how many hours I work. Which kind of creates a disincentive to work, right? It's a trick of psychology, I realize, and Danny says not to think about it that way, but it's kind of hard not to. Now at the end of every hour I'm going to have to ask myself if what I accomplished in that time was worth $8. And if he falls asleep (which seems likely on his current schedule; see first paragraph) I'm really going to feel ripped off because I could've gotten the same amount done without help if I'd known he was just going to sleep the whole time. But I guess what you're paying for is the certainty that your time will be your own, the predictability of schedule that otherwise never belongs to a parent.