What's new?

Well the biggest thing to occur recently is I gave birth to my little boy, Michael. He's very very cute and delightful, however mummy and daddy are a little tired. Having a baby and being at home all the time is very different from working and you start to notice little things like:

• The local post office doesn't have a ramp, but two steps that are impossible to get a pram up unless you carry it up (and that is not as easy as I thought it would be)
  
• I feel like I am living all of the 24 hours in a day
• Babies will generally sleep the longest when you don't want them to: for me it is between 7pm and 10pm or 11pm. I'd rather him sleep those 4 hours from 11pm onwards
  
• Trying to get babies into any sort of routine is hard
• Having a baby with you is a natural ice breaker- strangers will come up and start a conversation with you
• Changing your name sucks when you're as lazy as I am
• The next door neighbours always mow their lawns when I'm watching a movie or just getting bubs to sleep
• Babies are noisy sleepers
• Every noise starts to sound like baby noises so I spend my day pausing and wondering if that was Michael starting to wake up
• Having another room or a house seems more and more like a great idea with this one little addition to the family
• Parent rooms are now something that comes into consideration when selecting where to go shopping
  

Going anywhere now is a big adventure (cooking dinner is a big adventure!), especially if we need to get there at a particular time. I spend the hours in the morning feeding him trying to figure out what time I would need to start getting him ready and whether that correlates to when I predict he will wake up. For example, today I was going to go into the city to have lunch with friends. So if we say any time between 12pm and 1pm would be good to get into the city for lunch, I'd have to get a train around 30 minutes before that. If we aim for 12:30pm, that means I'd have to catch a train around 12pm and leave my house around 11:40am. Ideally, Michael would have just gone to sleep around 11:30am so we maximise his sleep time whilst being out. At 11:30pm I was calculating when he would go down and then get up and predicting whether it was likely that the 11:30am target was achievable.

Wake Up	Go Down
11:30pm	1:30am
3:30am	5am
7am	8:30am
10:30am	12pm

So I predicted that it would be a bit hard to reach the 11:30am goal, but if I woke him up earlier or got into the city later, it was still achievable.

What really happened was more along the lines of:

Wake Up	Go Down
11:30pm	1:30am
3:30am	4:30am
5am	resettled at 5:30am
6:30am	9:30am

At which point, it was predicted he would wake up at 11:30am and therefore getting into the city for lunch would be very hard. Options were to cancel and go another day or get him up without waking him around 10:30 and try to give him a short "top up" feed that would mean he'd sleep longer.

Anyway, he's irking and will most likely be up soon (around 11am), so I should go finish off anything else I need to before feeding him! It never stops!