Mar 30th, 2007
Noticeably absent
Well, at least I’ve noticed my absence from the blog, maybe you haven’t. Not that I wasn’t aware this was going to happen, but having a newborn truly whittles your life down to the bare necessities. To date, finding time to blog has been one thing that definitely got whittled out. The typical day of a newborn parent (at least this parent) boils down to:
- Sometime between 5am-6:30am: Struggle awake as early as humanly possible to head to work - prior to Holden arriving, I normally got up between 5-5:30 in order to beat the traffic on my 1 hour commute from Ann Arbor to Birmingham…haven’t been quite as good about doing that lately, but overall this hasn’t changed.
- Work: Thus far that’s normally between 6-7am through 4:30-5pm, followed by the round-trip on that 1 hour commute.
- 5-6pm through 8pm: Juggle between helping Jess take care of Holden, managing Colin’s ever shifting moods, making dinner, and going through Colin’s bedtime routine.
- 8pm-10 or 11pm: Trade Holden back and forth with Jess (since it’s rare he’s not being held by someone) and make some sort of feeble attempt to unwind.
- 10:30pm-1 or 2am: Take my shift of holding/watching/changing Holden and mixing in some sleep (if possible), before Jess wakes up and take him for the 2am-next morning shift.
That’s about all there’s time for during this first month - the good thing is that I know this is a finite phase; with Colin, we’d settled into a much saner and manageable routine by the middle of month 2, so fingers are crossed that we’ll be in that place soon. I know I’m not supposed to publicly disclose this info, since it’s detrimental to the continued existence of the species, but I’m sure it’s probably just us ![]()
All that being said, Holden is a great baby, and he’s really starting to smile a lot now, which has the uncanny effect of making you forget all about the temporary life-flipping-upside-down of adding to your nuclear family.