My friend said to her husband, “The baby is going to wake up soon. I just know it.” And, as if conjured, he did. I was duly impressed.

And then I became a parent and experienced sleep regression (I know, I know, it’s a progression in a shift from baby to adult sleep cycles and should be celebrated rather than dreaded, blah blah) and could set my watch to my baby’s nap times. Thirty minutes. Not one second longer.

My friend wasn’t the wizard parent I had long thought she was. (I mean, she might be, but not in the context of a napping four-month-old.) Out of seemingly nowhere, I found myself in precisely that phase of having an infant. Suddenly, I understood.

Add “sleep regression” to the list of reasons I now cringe upon hearing that someone “slept like a baby.” Unless something has gone very wrong, they have not. In fact, I would not wish sleeping like a baby upon anyone.

First of all, babies are terrible roomates. They are loud, particularly newborns. For such teensy creatures, they emit a whole range of grunts, snorts, and breathing sounds that could keep one awake, assuming one were not a freshly minted parent seeing double from sleep deprivation.

And babies wake up a lot, which seems to be forgotten by anyone who trills brightly that they’ve slept like a baby. The bright trilling indicates that, in fact, they have slept like an adult, which is the polar opposite of sleeping like a baby. Babies wake up because they have not yet developed the circadian rhythms that regulate the sleep-wake cycle, because they’re hungry, because they’re wet, because they have tummy aches, because they’re lonely, and because they’re babies. Part of what makes those first weeks so exhausting is that neither the parents nor the baby know why the baby is awake, and a process of elimination is sometimes needed to finally put everyone back to sleep.

However, babies are also quick learners, which means they develop circadian rhythms at around three months and thus have a “day” and a “night.” The longest sleep stretch happens at night, but baby’s night and mama’s night (I feel you, nursing mothers) sometimes only overlap for a very short time. And “sleeping through the night” for a baby actually means from midnight until five in the morning, which is less than optimal for the adults responsible for baby’s care.

But things get better! And you think you’ve got it! The loud newborn sounds fade (and you miss them), baby has a bedtime routine, bedtime gradually shifts earlier. And then sleep regression happens.

Sleep regression could be thought of positively: Baby is growing out of the 45-minute newborn sleep cycles and into the 90-minute adult sleep cycles. Yay! However, baby wakes after 30 minutes and cannot manage the transition to the next part of the cycle and is therefore awake. And suddenly, baby is awake a lot, meaning that baby also needs to be occupied. Huh.

The funny thing is, and this caught me completely by surprise, sleep regression seems to cause more of an upset during the day than at night. After all, baby has figured out night and day. But daytime naps are suddenly hardly enough time to eat something and take a shower/fold the laundry/clean the bathroom/call a friend/have a nap. Previously, baby slept a lot. Now, mama and papa are spending a lot of time trying to get baby to sleep. The rest of the time is spent trying to figure out what to do with a baby all day.

Like everything, this new rhythm gradually gets easier, too, and the new parents are now aware that regressions, which happen around important periods of development, are temporary and will pass. And babies start to do cute things, like wake up talking to themselves or kicking their feet up into the air or, as is the case with my six-month old this week, experimenting with the sounds they can make while blowing the tongue against the lips. Adorable though this is, I still would not recommend a baby as a roommate. That being said, I also can’t imagine being in a separate room, so I guess we’re stuck.

Point is: No adult is sleeping like a baby.

But being a baby does have advantages when it comes to sleeping, namely that babies can sleep anywhere. (And again, I know this isn’t the case for all babies.) On shoulders, in the car, in the snuggly, in the stroller, on the floor, on the couch, in the bouncer, in bed. When baby is young enough and tired enough, baby will sleep. And no amount of noise seems to disturb them. (I can hear you, parents of older babies and children. There are more fun times around the corner, I know.)

Perhaps this is what “I slept like a baby” refers to. But frankly, you don’t want to sleep like a baby. And new parents of babies are obsessed with getting baby to sleep like an adult. Half a year ago, I couldn’t have imagined how all-consuming this topic would be, and I now bristle at anyone who asks how my baby is sleeping – it’s a sensitive subject!

But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that as soon as I think we’ve adjusted to something, baby grows and changes, which is exactly what we want babies to do. My baby is sleeping like a baby, and that’s all there is to say about it.