Straightening the Story

This is Doug posting, after reading candice's post and the replies, I felt like I needed to blog my side of this story. I think the thing candice was missing in her post, is that our discussion was regarding days, or nights really, before I have to go to work. This all started one early morning (about 4am) when I had to work a 13 hour day starting at 6am which meant I had to get up at 5am. Kiera was being something of a beast, she wasnt sleeping, and candice was getting frustrated. Finally she brought Kiera into our room at 4am and put Kiera on me and told me to deal with her. I didnt think that was the best moment to ask for my help, and I said so. I am fine with helping on my off days, I think that is totally fair. One difficulty I think candice has with my offer of help is that I usually dont wake up when the baby cries. If I am woken up it takes me a few minutes to become functional, so usually candice simply takes care of the problem because she cant sleep while the baby cries, and most likely by the time I were to hear the baby, wake up and get out of bed, she could already be back in bed again sleeping if she were to just take care of it herself. Candice also gets her "goddess nights" where she and her friends go out (usually on a friday night) and pretend they are all single and have no cares in the world until 2 am, so in answer to a certain reply I do feel like candice has the chance once in a while to "blow off some steam".

So our question is..... Is it reasonable to ask someone who is going to be working a 8-13 hour day and needs to be somewhat functional at the end of their day, to share the responsibilities of getting up a few times in the middle of the night every night. For me personally, I dont think I function very well with a lack of sleep, and not getting a good nights rest before working, while unavoidable at times, is not something I would like to plan on doing regularly. If candice is about to loose it, then even if it is a work day, I have no problem helping once in a while. For example if she said at 4am on a work day something like "I know you have to work, but I am about to loose it (or some other special circumstance) could you take care of her for a bit", I think that is reasonable. But to plan on waking up 2-3 times a night then going to work and then doing it all over again the next night would simply leave me a zombie.... I have to call uncle on that idea