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.