Conquering the Night

I like this ‘midnight blog’ thing. Could become a trend.

The last few nights have been battles between Tyler’s unpredictability and his more reasonable nature as we try to figure out what a newborn sleep schedule might actually look like. Three and two nights ago were rough, with nice, solid, 4 hour sleep blocks surrounding a stretch of 4 hours in the middle of the night when Tyler was up and crying much of the time. I blame most of it on formula experiments. Last night was great. We put him to bed at 9, fed him every four hours, and he was pretty much asleep other than that. We’re trying again tonight, but so far Tyler hasn’t seen fit to actually go to sleep yet.

Jess, too, is coming along. We use the ‘walk’ as a metric of her progress. Today we bundled up Tyler, put him in the stroller and walked down the street to the park, and then back. Last time, Jess didn’t quite make it all the way, so progress, yes? Also, we saw a good 4 or 5 neighbors, all of whom we knew, and all of whom were all excited to see Tyler. It makes us feel good to think we’ve got some roots down here, tenuous as they might be, at times.

Speaking of metrics, we have a unit of measure around here called ‘The Cat’. It’s a measure of how much stuff you have on your lap that keeps you from getting up, easily. It’s used when someone needs to go do something, the one with fewer ‘cats’ usually has to get up and do it. Here are some equivalent cat measures, just in case you feel like adopting this system as your own.

1 Cat = 1 Cat
Being a little pregnant = 1 Cat
Being a lot pregnant = 3 Cats
Holding a Baby = 2 Cats
Holding a sleeping baby = 3 Cats
Using a Laptop = 0 Cats
Eating = .5 Cats
Having a Cesarean in the past 3 days or less = All the Cats
Having a Cesarean in the past week or less = Approx 1 Cat, depending on painkiller levels
Husband modifier = Approx 1 cat

-N